Selecting snippets

Her Worldcat Identities page currently appears on the first page of results in a search for Eavan Boland

Thom Hickey mentioned steps that his group is taking to make Identities more crawler-friendly in a recent post. Looking through various results with him the other day, the Boland snippet caught our eye. If you look at the Boland Identities page you will see that the snippet comes from the last listed book by her (here are the books, scroll down).


I wonder what Google did here? This is a good snippet to post, maybe even the best available on that page? How did Google select it? I assume that they have algorithms which look for the best candidate sentence or two? it is not just the first match. Were they just luck here, or are they usually this good? I will have to look out for this more in the future …..