New style for Titles? Strange !

[rishi321us]

Hi Friends,

Noticed a very strange thing in Yahoo listings today.

They are cropping site titles from the beginning - to explain a bit more, we have all noticed that if your title is long it gets cropped down from the end but I found a few sites that has got their titles cropped from the beginning - the first few words are cropped out from the title.

On a little more observation , i noticed that they are trying to limit the titles to 80 characters, however, this cropping from front style is not applied to all sites- some of them are cut short by the last few words whereas for some others the first few words are not there .

Any idea what's cooking ?

[chrishirst]

Been happening for a couple of months now. It's just the same as they do for the SERP snippet and crop the title around the search phrase.

If the search phrase would be cropped by the title length display limit, the title is cropped from the front to keep the phrase in view.

[rishi321us]

Well, I cannot fully agree to the loginc that they are cropping the title to display and focus on the keyword - when we searched for some keywords which were actually the first two words in the title and also present in the middle of the title, the first part was cropped out. what do you say on that ??

[chrishirst]

probably the programmer decided to centre on the latter instances of the search phrase in the happenstance that there where multiple instances in the string that is extracted.

[rishi321us]

humm, probably.. these search engines would always keep us guessing...

I have also noticed that the quality of search results in yahoo has drastically dropped... at times they are showing irrelevant results and aain at times they would show multiple pages from the same site for a particulr keywords- and when i say multiple pages i don't mean just two pages-- i have seen upto 4 pages from the same site shown as separate results for the same keyword.