[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.