Inktomi Descriptions

When did they start using snippets?

[coconutz]

I was looking at some of our free pages in Ink (using Pure Search and MSN) and noticed that the descriptions are taken from the page text instead of the meta description like our PFI page. Is this something new?

[Robert Charlton]

coconutz - This relates to the subject of another thread [webmasterworld.com] on Inktomi descriptions, where I'd noticed that they were using ODP descriptions, but clearly also spidering the site.

I've kicked that thread up and also linked to this one. What I'm seeing is snippets when ODP descriptions aren't present. The snippets seem to break at sentence breaks, which sometimes makes them pretty irrelevant.

[coconutz]

I did read the other thread regarding ODP descriptions. The descriptions I'm seeing today are three to four lines and complete sentences. There are no breaks in the middle of the sentence. These pages are not in ODP.

[Robert Charlton]

>>The descriptions I'm seeing today are three to four lines and complete sentences.<<

Basically, I'm seeing the same thing, though for some sites I'm seeing descriptions that are shorter. By breaking at sentence breaks, they are usually complete sentences, which I find less satisfying, not more, than shorter snippets. You get a whole sentence, but it's often not really what the site is about... and the uninformed surfer probably won't know it's an excerpt.

[egomaniac]

My PFI INK pages are showing text snippets from the top of the pages. I checked a few competing pages quickly and came to the conclusion that the snippet was always from the top of the page (i.e. not context sensitive as in Google).

None of my sites/pages have ODP listings, so I can't comment on that.

This is a very recent change... less than a week or so old.

[skiguide]

I discovered this yesterday with one of my client sites and it's driving me nuts! I cannot for the life of me figure out where they are getting the snippet. I swear, i've looked everywhere.

The site isn't in PFI, it looks like a directory description, but isn't any ODP/Yahoo/Looksmart incarnation i can find, and it's not in ALT tags, not in content or meta like this at all - and the site only has two truly spiderable pages (the rest is dynamic parameter mess).

[skibum]

It seems very bizarre. When looking at the Ink listing of one homepage that has an ODP, ZEAL, and YAHOO! listing, Ink doesn't pull from any of those. It pulls stuff from the page that has little if anything to do with the query.

Google snippets at least vary with, and often reflect the query, but it seems like Ink just pulls some random text. Sometimes it is from the top of the page and sometimes from a few different places on the page.