How a Search Engine May Choose Search Snippets By Bill Slawski, SEO by the Sea (Dec 4)

Today search engines show a snippet from the page – this might be summary of page, section where your search terms occur, description from DMOZ (true at Google), or the publisher’s metadescription (rare).

Yahoo has a patent that should make those snippets more relevant.

“The Yahoo patent filing tells us that it could look at the following for each line on a page, to come up with a score for each line to use as a snippet: * A query-independent relevance for each line of text – a degree to which the line of text of the document summarizes the document.
* A query-dependent relevance of each of the lines of text – a relevance of the line of text to the query.
* The intent behind a query.”