Bingo Dominic ... you are absolutely correct! I am seeing the results I talked about on http://64.233.167.99/ .. Interesting! ....
Nothing new. I noticed that earlier. Yes, DMOZ uses the title in "certain circumstances". Check this for example for seologik.se: Search for SEO on Google.se and you get this. Search for sökmotoroptimering on Google.se and you get this. Same URL has two different titles depending on the query. One of them is taken from DMOZ.
I'm late to the DMOZ party in Google titles.... But I have to agree. My listings in Google are showing my website with the title and description used in DMOZ which is ancient and I've been trying to update in DMOZ for years. The editor never responds to me...as the title and description isn't what it should be, very vague and is over 4+ years old. But to find the DMOZ title and description of my website in Google's index under site: command instead of the normal title and description that Google had in the index....was driving me buggy. I'm glad to know that I'm not alone. Its sorta like being sent to Google purgatory.....
This has been happening on and off for the past two years - some of the descriptions are even verbatim of the ODP/Goolge directory's. Not too surprising, it seems to vary on keyword searches, geography, etc. Now here's the anomally that I've noticed - having javascript in the top of your code tends to seem to be a factor in this; if there's js in the top of the code, Goolge doesn't have enough initial content for their bot to determine a description - it then appears that it will pick up a Google Directory (ODP feed) description or if none, actually use the sites meta description tag if it's present.
Couldnt believe it but it is confirmed now. Google uses the Anchor text in DMOZ listings as the preferred display-title of a website for its SERPs. Strange. What next? Regards, Dilip Samuel
Sometimes. Not necessarily "preferred", though. Even for the same page, it depends on what search terms are used to find the page. Google will try to find those search terms wherever it can - snippet, title, URL, etc. - and display the best snippet for that query.