Snippet location on the page?

Where is it coming from?

[internetheaven]

I had always thought of Googlebot as just a piece of software - he doesn't have a favourite ice-cream, he's not left or right-handed and he doesn't select which parts of a web page "sound" the best.

When doing my usual "ranking-check" rounds today I spotted that Google was displaying paragraphs from the bottom of the web page when there was perfectly good matching paragraphs at the top.

Generally, my keywords for the page are included in the meta description which is then what Google displays. Sometimes, if a page has been ranked due to anchor text rather than on page factors, Google will list the first sentence it finds with that keyword in as the description.

NOW, it seems as though he is picking out the bits he likes best. Sometimes a sentence from the middle of the page, sometimes from the end. There seems to be no logical explanation for it as there are plenty of sentences at the top of the page which have those keywords in.

A long explanation I know, but I was trying to think of possible implications about how Google is currently "reading" the content of a page. Forum members had flirted with the theory that Google pays more attention to the "last" bits of text/links on a page as a sort of counter-measure for webmasters who push everything to the top.