One of the most interesting sessions at the SES Show in San Jose was the talk about the snippet to be displayed with in the SERPs.

As it seems many people want to control exactly which snippet is displayed there and were really begging for some kind of Meta-Tag to control that.

Google's position on this was the "optimum user-perspective" , i.e. to display the most relevant piece of the page/document they found for the user's query.

My take on this is that Google does it just right… they highlight the searched keywords in the most relevant displayed piece of the document.

If they cannot find any real relevant piece, they just display the Meta Description – which is just fine with a document like this post

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and the query Deep Link Analysis Tool

Tim Mayer of Yahoo had a great, flow-chart like rule description about how Yahoo displays the snippet to the user and I'l rush out to find that in the paper downloads or forum posts ASAP. Matt Cutts didn't have one at the show, but maybe he created one afterwards… let's see.

An interesting sideline of the snippet-extraction is that the Search-Engines work internally using snippets to detect duplicate content… of course they don't compare whole documents, but small pieces of those.