It could be seen that all the efforts that have been spent in writing meta descriptions have resulted into nothing. After bringing up the Data Retention controls by Google Analytics, this is another confirmation that has been made by the search engine. The latest announcement was made after five months of its notification of increasing the search result snippets.

What Google has to say on this?

Danny Sullivan stated, “Our search snippets are now shorter on average than in recent weeks.” He also added “… slightly longer than before a change we made last December.” Google confirmed that writing meta descriptions is not affected with longer search snippets. So, the webmasters were notified not to write longer meta descriptions.

What would be the length of the snippet?

On discussion over length, Sullivan said “There is no fixed length for snippets. Length varies based on what our systems deem to be most useful.” He added, Google will not state a new maximum length for the snippets because the snippets are generated dynamically.

The RankRanger tracker tool gives an average length desktop character to be around 160 characters which is much less than the previous 300 characters. The mobile characters were averaged down to 130 in this new shortened search result.

Is there any need to change meta description?
Google has advised not to dwell much on this new development as these snippets are dynamic and not from any meta description. Rather these are found to be from web content.