I noticed this while doing some research last night. It appears Google is testing the expansion of the META description tag. As you can see in the screenshot below, some tags are significantly longer than previously allowed with one stretching up to 318 characters as opposed to the typical 150 or so.
So far, it seems to only happen with long tail keyphrases. I’ve been able to duplicate the results with several other searches.
Has anyone else seen this?
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UPDATE: There’s a good discussion thread about this over at High Rankings Forums.
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It appears to us that Google is no longer using meta description on sites and is now looking at content. As of tonight, we can no longer see Google is picking up meta descriptions on current content or sites that are currently being cached.
Google is still pulling from description tags. Just checked several queries to confirm.