Google’s double standard

‘To err is human’ and is quite understandable, as it is not only hard but impossible to achieve perfection – Accepted. On the flip side machines do work (whatever it may entail) with perfection leaving no room for error. Numerous organizations across the world have achieved the distinction of being perfect (thanks to technology) in whatever they do and people look upon them for guidance and inspiration. It is this faith and integrity that keep these organizations alive and ticking. But it also gives them the added responsibility to carry the mantle of moral and social responsibility, to be fair and just in their deeds.

To give precedence to my finding, I would like to build some basic background which would help me draw a clearer picture. The number of characters that should be used for the ‘title’ of a website is a widely debated topic. Ask this question in a SEO forum and you would be amazed at the variety of answers that you would get. Blame it on the fact that our industry operates without any set guidelines or blame it on search engines that closely guard their secret. Ask the same question to any seasoned SEM professional and pat comes the reply, “65-70 characters”. Not an exact figure, so as to accommodate as many search engines as possible, but useful nonetheless. Anything over and above the higher limit (depending on the search engine) is truncated and is usually followed by a “….”

The story is usual until now and had been sung a thousands times. However I witnessed something (only by accident) that contradicted this widely believed notion. “A temporary glitch” I thought. A repeat search yielded the same result and it leads me to believe that it is no mistake.

If you closely monitor the above snapshot you would realize that the title in question (and contention) is more that 70 characters long (89 characters to be precise) but is not truncated like any other listing. My curiosity was further piqued by the fact that the listing is related to Google. Is Google working on two sets of standards, one for itself and the other for the rest of the world? I was so tempted to discount it as an error and just get on with my usual stuff, which I was doing prior to finding this. But then, do we expect Google to make such errors or for that matter is this error at all. I will leave that to your best judgment.