navigation anchor text in serp titles

[phranque]

i was recently looking at a small site when i noticed something i hadn't seen before.

all the title elements for the main pages of the site contained duplicate text.
however the titles as shown in the SERP were preceded by the anchor text from the main site navigation link for each page.
this was true for site:example.com as well as other keyword phrase searches.

for example, if the duplicate titles were in the form of "Company Name - City Name Service", the titles looked like "Articles - Company Name - City Name Service" and "Contact Us - Company Name - City Name Service".
is this something new that google is doing or is this just the first time i happened to notice it?

(yahoo and bing show the duplicate titles.)

[tedster]

I saw something like this last week on a site with 2,000 duplicate titles - and it did look like internal anchor text. I've seen it occasionally a while ago, but maybe Google is doing in more consistently now, as they can.