Google shows meta description

Just for new/fresh pages, it seems

[LowLevel]

I uploaded some new pages a couple of days ago, made some searches and noticed that Google can build the snippet using meta description contents, too.

Depending on the searched keywords, Google can display even the full meta description text.

I tried to obtain the same result with "old" pages (indexed before the last DB update), but it seems it works just on new pages.

Is this new?

[ken_b]

I noticed the other day the discription for one of my top 4 pages was the exact and entire meta tag description. The other 3 were the typical Googlese.

All four were updated at the same time.

But this was the first time I'd noticed the meta tag description being used.

That doesn't mean it a new thing, just that I hadn't noticed it before on my pages.

[coconutz]

Google does display the meta descriptions, but not necessarily just for new pages. Lately, they have been using the meta description whenever the search term is found within the meta description. If the search term is not found in the meta description, it will display a snippet of text from the page where the search term is found.

Previously it was noticed that Google switched to using the meta descriptions just prior to an update. There are always exceptions, and there are quite a few discussions related to this that can be found using the Site Search. [searchengineworld.com]

[Flippi]

Yes, Google shows a meta description for some pages. It has obviously nothing to do with fresh crawl, cause I've got deep crawled pages in the results.

It seems a fact also, that the meta description is not indexed by Google and therefore not searchable (if the keyword is only in the description).