[untog]

> Google loses literally nothing.

That's not true. The entire reason Google hosts these "snippets" on their search results page is to keep users on that page and not clicking through to other sites. With this they lose that ability.

You're talking as if Google News is the only affected site here. It isn't: the vast majority of this traffic is on search results pages. Which Google does make vast amounts of money from.

[beaner]

Are you saying this out of theory or experience? Anecdotally as a user I can tell you that when I see a compelling snippet, I am more likely to click, not less.

[shkkmo]

While the quick answers on the right of Google search results may be designed to keep people from clicking through, I have never seen that feature used for a news article (for me is is usually stackoverflow and Wikipedia where this has an impact on click throughs.)

I don't think this is the case for search or news. The "snippets" under a search result make me more likely to click through and really don't ever provide enough info to allow me to skip reading the page.

Since your assertion runs counter to my (and others) experience, I hope you have some actual data to back this up? Perhaps a website that added a robots.txt to prevent snippet collection and saw an improvement in traffic from search?