This just looks like a bug to me. The snippets text in the screenshots is just the same text repeated over and over... |
(Of course, it could be a GreaseMonkey script that's causing this bug too...) |
I do not use GreaseMonkey scrit. Some forum user from that thread also see the changes. The same results appear as well in IE and Firefox browsers. |
Nevermind the cause, I think this would make a great google feature in the future. While it should never be the default, being able to increase the Snippet length as an option would improve the usefulness of searching in many contexts, especially academic. |
I like the idea of them doing that though. If it could be used intelligently, and only for well trusted sites, I wouldn't mind a little more description. It would make it less of a fish hunt than it is right now. |
I wonder whether those snippets are "fair use" tho :) |
If normal snippets are fair use, *those* snippets will be fair use too since they're just the usual snippet text repeated over and over... ;-) |
I haven't been able to recreate those snippets either.. |
> If normal snippets are fair use, *those* snippets
> will be fair use too
Yeah my reply was more to the people wishing for this feature in the future :) |
Oh ok so how many lines would be considered "Fair Use" ?? How much can google display as part of the rezults |
From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use
<< In general, the less that is used in relation to the whole, e.g., a few sentences of a text for a book review, the more likely that the sample will be considered fair use. >>
Hmm. What if the entire contents of a page were displayed in a snippet? The search user would have no reason to visit the website. Surely this wouldn't be fair use at all. And since all pages vary in length, Google couldn't just say "X lines" or even "X words" would be fair use. (In theory, this could even happen now.) Perhaps they'd have to come up with some way of showing a % of the total number of words in the page as a maximum. Which I doubt they'd realistically bother doing... |
Well, right now Google is actually republishing the full content of pages... via their cache feature. I never understood how that's OK with common copyright laws. |
Good point, although webmasters can disable this if they want. However, I don't think it's possible to disable snippets from showing whilst still allowing your content to be fully indexed. |
Yeah, but copyright laws aren't "opt-in" right? I mean I think the cache is cool, and I wish stuff like this which doesn't harm another publisher would be always legal in copyright laws, I just don't understand how this is legal within the current system. I asked Lawrence Lessig about this in January though I didn't hear back from him on this (note: even though he always has a lot to do he does indeed answer most emails, so this ain't no complaint :)). |
An author can instruct Google to not show snippets or cache a file according to the below Google help files.
Perhaps a cache is actually created within Google but not made public.
<META NAME="GOOGLEBOT" CONTENT="NOSNIPPET">
"Note: removing snippets also removes cached pages."
<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOODP">
<META NAME="GOOGLEBOT" CONTENT="NOODP">
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35304
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35264 |
I didn't know that was possible... thanks George R.! |
