[didibus]

I think of it more as if you put a banner with content somewhere in the public, and I take a photo of it, what can I later do with that photo?

And for that, it's a question of copyright. It turns out, in the US, if something is publicly available it does not make the copyright a part of the public domain. Thus the original author still retains copyright unless explicitly stated otherwise.

There is an exception to this though, which is called fair use. And for that, I'd recommend reading this: https://amp.theatlantic.com/amp/article/411058/ Book snippets by Google searched were deemed fair use.

So the question remains, would website snippet similarly count as fair use? What will the federal courts rule be? And when it comes to fair use, that's the only way to know if it is or not.

[Silhouette]

It's worth pointing out in this context that the US legal concept of fair use is not universal. In fact, unusually for US IP laws, it's actually much more permissive than most other places. The more usual practice is to enumerate specific situations where copying without the copyright holder's consent is still allowed, instead of defining general tests, which is how fair use works. This has been a controversial point, because it's not clear that the US scheme is sufficient to meet its obligations under international treaties.

In answer to your final question, I'm not sure whether this use of snippets in search engine results has been tested in any US courts yet, but the issue of search engines showing enough content from the sites they link to that users never actually go through to the original site is sufficiently controversial that the EU's recently passed copyright directive includes specific provisions aimed at exactly that sort of situation.