is using "best" in a title bad for rankings?

is this really true?

[yallknowho]

Right now I have best in my title because I think a search for "Best <my product>" would be pretty common. I have heard that search engines dont like the word Best, but we're coming up on the first page. Could we get booted for doing this?

[caveman]

Not that I know of. We have pages that include that word in the title, when it is justifiable, and have no issues with any SE.

[DXL]

I myself never use subjective words in titles and descriptions. The closest I come is maybe "quality" or words that denote something good, but I never use words like "best", "great", "excellent" so as not to take chances.

[Robert Charlton]

I have heard that search engines dont like the word Best, but we're coming up on the first page.

Perhaps this thought got passed down by people who didn't know the difference between search engines and directories.

Directories don't like promotional hype in their titles or descriptions, but I haven't heard that title superlatives can hurt you in crawler-based search engines, particularly if they're searched (which they are).

[Robert Charlton]

A PS to my post above, as a further clarification...

I have seen search engines drop superlatives in some titles in the serps, but I don't think this affects ranking.

An example I cite in a thread on another forum is this...

A Google search for [Yahoo] [google.com] brings up in the third place...

Yahoo! Mail
mail.yahoo.com

When you click on the link, though, you see that mail.yahoo.com has this title on the page returned...

Yahoo! Mail - The best web-based email!

There are lots of possibilities why this is happening. I doubt that a hand edit is involved, and I doubt that this would affect the ranking of this page.

In fact, if you search for [best email] on Google [google.com], the Yahoo page comes up at #4, this time with this listing...

Yahoo! Mail - The best web-based email!
mail.yahoo.com

All of the search engines have made statements about wanting to display titles that best satisfy the query. Again, I don't think that a change in title display affects rankings.