How do Yelp and Justia get all the extra Meta Description Real estate?

[RobertFisher]

I was doing some KW research for a client and noticed something interesting with regard to Yelp and Justia. For a search on DWI Attorneys, they each had over 300 character meta descriptions showing on the SERP without truncating. Everyone else was either truncated or within limit of roughly 160 characters. Obviously if there is a way to get something other than a list to show that way you can own some real estate. Would love to hear from some of you Mozzers on this. Here are two images that should assist.

Best

Edit: I found one that was not a directory site and it appears it is Google doing it. The site has no meta description for the home page and this is what is being pulled by Google. There are 327 characters here! The truncation marks are showing it being pulled from different parts of the page. Image is Killeen DWI Attorney.

NOTE None of these are clients, etc. I also changed the cities so this is a general search.

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[Roman-Delcarmen]

As I know Google has made a significant change since 2016 to its search results pages by extending the length of titles and descriptions.

Title tags have been increased to 70–71 characters, which is up from its previous 50–60 characters. That’s at least enough to fit in another word or two.

Meta descriptions have been increased by 100 characters per line, and extended from two to three lines. That’s a significant increase, and presents far more of an opportunity to tell searchers what the page is about.

Google is still truncating the descriptions to two lines for many search results still, so you may still see them coming in at around 160 characters at times. When a three line snipped is displayed they come in at 278 characters per line.

t’s important to note that this may be a test which Google could reverse at any time.

https://www.reddit.com/r/bigseo/comments/4ixf86/google_has_increased_the_width_of_the_search/

[JoyHawkins]

Although I haven't tested this myself, I've heard others say that removing the meta description is one way to get Google to show a bigger description in the search results because they pull information off your website instead of sticking to the character limit of the tag.