Did Google lower the amount of characters allowed in the description?

I'm looking at search results on Google and the descriptions of sites seem to be getting cut off with "...". Did Google lower the amount of characters allowed in the description?

yeah i noticed same stuff, but haven't paid much attention to the actual length now.. one way or another for the different keyword searches they pick different portions of the text from throughout your whole page to display as description in the SERPs..

Yeah... They lower the amount of characters ..