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This is a video from Matt Cutts of Goolge explaining their policy on indexing sites and handling robots.txt directives.

Google are now indexing 350 characters from meta descriptions for their search results when users provide more than three keywords. This means you have double the space to get your message accross and can get more keywords into the text. It is also helpful because you can send a more meaningful message to searchers.

Google Official Blog Reference

Google page title

Google indexes 63 characters in the page title they use on the search results. Other search engines use longer titles.

Google meta description

Google indexes 155 characters from your meta description.

A new paridigm in charging for Adwords is emerging. Pay per action allows for advertisiers to only be charged when a specific goal is achieved after an adver is clicked. This will clearly provide a better return on investment for adwords style campaigns but clearly the cost per action must be more. I don't expecct advertising costs to go down but the return on investement surely will improve.

I have always found the management of Adwords Campaigns slightly tedious. Whilst I apprecciate the benefits, it can turn into a full time job coping with a site having a big budget. One useful tool I use a lot is the Keyword Tool which is capable of taking a url and scrapig for suggested keywords.

There is an assumption these days that Google is the only search engine. However, it is not. There are some good alternatives, one I stumbled accross today is vivisimo.com which I found to be very useful in that you can browse categories once you have done a search.