So I was jogging laps through the Big 4’s SERPs today, checking on a few queries of interest to see what, if anything, is new since the last time I looked. And … whoa. Yahoo!, indeed. Is it just me, or are Yahoo’s SERPs on steroids? Look at this:

Look at that title. I cut and pasted it into MS Word, and Word says that title is 14 words long and has 99 characters. Yikes. It’s so big that it’s almost spilling onto THREE lines! Yeah, caps lock makes it look even bigger - but regardless, that’s huge.

But that wasn’t all. Have a look at this…

Check out the snippet on this listing. Word tells me that thing is 386 characters long. It’s runs for five lines. I saw another one today that ran SIX lines long (but had only 362 characters).

On the other engines, these same listings run about half as long as what Yahoo is showing.

Is this new? I’ve never seen such bloated listings on Yahoo before. But you know what? Caps lock issues aside, I like it. More content = more information = more informed click decision. Yeah, it takes longer to scroll through a page of SERPs, but that’s a trade I’ll make.