How do search engines do this?

[bHIP Energy Blend]

How do search engines such as Google collect "reviews" about websites and display them on the page? For example, if you searched 'entrepreneur' in Google, entrepreneur.com would come up as a link with 'Online and print small business publication...' under it. I understand that it comes from the content on the website but how does Google chose to display that sentence in particular? Is there any way to alter what is displayed?

[vangogh]

It depends on what someone is searching for. The snippet below the link may come from your meta description tag, it may come from the description about your site from the Yahoo directory or the Open directory if you're included in either, or it may just be random parts of the page. Most of the time it will be the last one and Google will choose the parts of the page they think best match what the person was searching for.

You don't really have any way to control what's going to show up there. You could write a meta description that's relevant to the main phrase or phrases you want the page to be found for, but for the most part Google is going to pick whatever they think best to show in the snippet.

[Harold Mansfield]

Google picks the most relevant information by matching the search term or phrase with the content on the page. Other factors include the page's popularity, age, traffic, links, authority, domain name, load times, content (including multimedia) and a bunch of stuff that they won't disclose.

[paneli]

My sites it has been almost always text that has been in description meta tag.

[jpohl]

You are going to have an easier time finding the Holy Grail than finding out the Google search algorithm. As eborg9 stated, relevance is the key to google success. Their one primary directive is to provide relevant search results to searchers. With that in mind, as Vangogh indicated, the test may come from a myriad number if possible text locations associated with your site. It used to be primarily the description meta tag but as site owners started keyword stuffing the tags, Google got more sophisticated.

[LLP707]

It depends on what someone is searching for. The snippet below the link may come from your meta description tag, it may come from the description about your site from the Yahoo directory or the Open directory if you're included in either, or it may just be random parts of the page. Most of the time it will be the last one and Google will choose the parts of the page they think best match what the person was searching for.

You don't really have any way to control what's going to show up there. You could write a meta description that's relevant to the main phrase or phrases you want the page to be found for, but for the most part Google is going to pick whatever they think best to show in the snippet.

Yea this is for the most part true. Sometimes Google will use Dmoz data if they feel it is more appropriate. To disable this insert the following tag in your HEAD section of the HTML code to stop Google from using the DMOZ description:

<meta name=”ROBOTS” content=”NOODP”/> disables DMOZ title/description
<meta name=”robots” content=”NOYDIR” /> disables Yahoo Directory title/description
<meta name="robots" content="noodp, noydir" /> disables both
<META NAME="Description" CONTENT="Your descriptive sentence or two goes here.">

If these are disabled and you have a meta description tag it should use that instead.
If your website doesn't have meta description tag then Google will show small and related part of your webpage content as a snippet in Google SERP. However even if you have a meta tag sometimes they will use parts of text surrounding the keyword as your description. I haven't seen them override your description with this too often though. If you really want your description though you can remove all instances of that keyword in the article and they will be forced to use your description. Google shows up to 156 characters (including spaces) of a page's meta description tag. So keep it short. Sorry for the mountain of text lol.

[vangogh]

If these are disabled and you have a meta description tag it should use that instead.

Regardless of whether or not you have a meta description Google may (and most of the time) will show snippets of text from the page. You can't force them to show the meta description. They'll choose whatever they think is best for the particularly query being used.

[tylerhutchinson]

Either metatags or they will take wording out of your page, usually off your home page and it generally is the first section in the page design and coding.

[vangogh]

They generally try to match the users query with text they think most likely to lead to a click. It seems like most of the time that ends up being random snippets from the page.

[jasmin]

Google collects review information via rich snippets (microdata, rdfa) (http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=99170)

You can configure your website to provide such information. Google also started providing preview of the web pages. When you hover on the search icon, you can clearly see where the snippet/keywords is available on that page.