[lettergram]

I'm fully following what's going on and I think it's a bit more nuanced than your comment. Many many of the arguments i've seen have not to do with linking, but with the preview. The preview is Google automatically pulling answers to questions from their site. They wanted that to end, because they wanted actual visitors OR they wanted Google to pay for that information.

Google can and could always link to the website. What they were doing was a bit more than that. Google is now trying to strong arm them to let them pull data from their sites. Literally, everything you describe above is what occurs when someone has a monopoly.

[shkkmo]

There are two different things you are conflating, the quick answer thing to the right of the search results is different from the snippet shown below the item in search and news.

The quick answer area has a different set of issues and I think there is a stronger argument to be made for it reducing click through rates (though I always click through when the quick answers my question to verify there isn't additional relevant context that is not included.)

Publishers already had the ability to block Google's indexing, image indexing, news indexing and snippet creation and even snippet length using meta headers.

It is unclear to me how this actually gives publishers any more control over how Google uses their content. It seems to have much larger impacts on smaller aggregators. It does put legal weight behind that control, but it seems to me that a much better law would have standardized these meta-headers and put the force of law behind them, perhaps creating a header that notifies crawlers that they must have a license to display snippets of text over a certain length from a site. As it is, is there any way for a publisher to automatically grant all agregators rights to display snippets of their content or does the law forcibly opt all publishers into content restrictions?

[PyroLagus]

But they were always able to opt-out of the snippets quite easily. What they wanted was to have the snippets AND to get paid on top of that.

[repolfx]

There's no way to link to a news story without at least excerpting the headline, as otherwise you'd not know what you were clicking on. And snippets have always been a part of search engines, which is why I didn't separate them.

Regardless, Google allows you to request links but no snippets for your content, again, it's all possible with pre-existing protocols and standards.

Really, Google is trying to strong-arm nobody. I don't see how anyone could conclude that. Google offer publishers a range of reasonable options from full cooperation to partial indexing to non-inclusion, always has, and those publishers have repeatedly refused to take advantage of any of these features.

What they want isn't control over linking or snippeting. That is obvious. What they want is the status quo, plus lots of money.

[pas]

If the issue is the automatically extracted answer, does this new change solves that? Is there any meta tag to control that?