We just shipped an update to Jobster.com that improves the quality and relevance of the job summaries displayed next to search hits; for example see the results of a search for search engine jobs in Seattle.

Google has trained users to expect hit summaries that are frequently fragmentary and hard to understand. A hit for “string theory” might include the summary “Interest in string theory is driven largely by the hope that it will prove to be a … It is not yet known whether string theory will be able to describe a …”

Vertical job search services, Jobster included, largely followed Google’s lead in their initial implementations of hit summaries. It’s a challenging problem to choose a few sentences that capture the essence of a long job description. Our next iteration is a good step forward but there’s clearly lots more we can do.

I believe that even for general web search it should be possible to greatly improve the quality of the summaries so that users have to do less pogo-sticking to find the results they want. One example is what Live is doing with their academic search. Notice how you can mouse over the hits on the Live results for search engine to view the title, abstracts, and authors of each hits.

When general web search summaries become good and comprehensive enough, it may not even be necessary in some cases to click through to the site hosting the content, which will result in increased tension between search engine and site authors and increased pressure to find ways to compensate content authors regardless of where their content is hosted.