How much text is indexed by search engines?

[flyingpylon]

Does anyone know (roughly) how much of a page is indexed by the various search engines? Is there a rule of thumb that says that you should have your content appear within the first X number of characters on the page?

I'm developing a site that pages through a lot of internal search results pages (the searches are pre-defined) and I've included a form with a drop-down box at the top of the page that allows the user to jump to a specific page in the results. However, I just realized that this adds a lot of junk to the page (with all of the option elements) and that from an SEO perspective it may not be all that smart.

Anyone have any ideas for retaining the feature but limiting the impact on SEO? I like the drop-down, but I suppose I could also just make it a small text field and have the user enter the number of the page they wanted to go to.

[Mike]

I don't think there's a set amount that anyone knows of. Just try and keep everything as far up as possible, and try to remove the junk html tags.

[digitalpoint]

Google will index the first 100k of each page...

- Shawn