Google Adds Header Tag or Link Text before page title in Search Results
Google has decided to help websites which have the same title site wide. It usually attaches the H1 tag in front of the site wide title. If the H1 tag is not present it adds the H2, H3 up to H6 or even the link text. e.g XYZ Beach Huts Palolem Goa - Welcome To ABC Tours and Travels . Here Welcome To ABC Tours and Travels is the site wide title and XYZ Beach Huts Palolem Goa is the H1 header on that particular page. In case none of the above are available it even uses the other headers up to H6 and attaches them in front of the title. If the header tags are not available Google uses the link text and attaches it at the beginning of the title as seen below. 
Even this rescue act is performed for only the first 12 pages or so up to a maximum of 20.
The importance of the title is so great that the sites which had no ranking whatsoever for the inner pages now manage to rank in the first 5 pages (50 results) of google's results for some low competition keywords. If their header tag H1 was well optimized and had otherwise an extremely good relevance to the topic being searched.
Just imagine the returns if the website was fully optimized. However even such websites are completely out of luck in Yahoo, MSN as well as other search engines.
Unique titles and their Role in Getting the Site Indexed
Unique titles can even play a role in indexing. If all titles as well as descriptions are the same some search engines believe that all pages have the same or nearly same content. As an example a travel agency site has only 46 pages indexed by Yahoo while Bing has just 2 pages indexed. There are more than 300 pages in the Google index.
Note that without being indexed the page has no chance of being featured in the results and the more pages that are in the index the higher the page rank of the home page for very large sites.
Spammy Titles Penalized Badly
On the other hand websites using titles the length of a description have been penalised very badly. In this case some times Google uses no title at all with very disastrous consequences to the ranking.
