[randallsquared]

The little snippets of text under each link are only 20-30 words long. They rarely convey anything of value.

My experience could not be more different. Probably half the searches I ever do on Google are complete without opening any of the links, because the answer I'm looking for is in the summary. Say I use Google only fifty times a day (many days it's more than that, but some days less). The vast majority of those searches are for trivial things that I would never have bothered to find out until after Google:

"What's a more businesslike word that kinda means flighty... oh, capricious, right."

"4.1 million rupiah? What's that in USD... ok, a little over 400 bucks."

"What's this error message from mysql|apache|PHP mean?"

"What's this error message from I-don't-know-what mean?"

Now that I think of it, the summary answers my immediate question well over half the time. You appear to make an argument that that's bad for Google.