[ColinWright]

I've said this elsewhere[0], but as I see it Google no longer simply provides links to the content, it also provides substantial excerpts. In that way they are effectively copying the original works.

That's called Plagiarism[1].

I've said more in the longer comment[0].

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25870825

[1] Added in edit: squiggleblaz[2] correctly notes[3] that it's not plagiarism, since Google is not passing off the words as their own. It's more accurately a form of fraud, or perhaps copyright infringement. Copyright laws allow for short snippets to be quoted as "fair use" (or similar) and so far the quoting by Google has been regarded as legitimate. Perhaps that needs to change.

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=squiggleblaz

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25870909

[squiggleblaz]

It's not plagiarism. Words have meanings. Plagiarism is when you take someone else's work and pass it off as your own (or an earlier work and pass it off as new); it as a form of fraud.

This is closer to copyright infringement, although so far it has been regarded as legitimate.

[ColinWright]

I've added to my comment ... thank you.

[simion314]

>Copyright laws allow for short snippets to be quoted as "fair use" (or similar) and so far the quoting by Google has been regarded as legitimate. Perhaps that needs to change

From my observations Google is trying to pull out the answer you are looking for so you don't have to visit the source website, seen it with Stack Overflow answers , or list of commands to run to do X, or sometimes it can understand questions like "how I do X" and finds the correct forum post and the answer with the steps recommended by users to run.

The end result is less people are visiting the original page, so it would be similar with Google just cloning the entire Web and all the pages you browse will be on Google servers.

[sidibe]

I think you're missing that it's voluntary:

<meta name="robots" content="nosnippet">