Google is writing their own snippets for star athletes

[londrum]

i hope the mods will forgive me including a search term here, but i think it's quite important. i happened across this today, and noticed that the snippet underneath the site at position no.1 has been rewritten to include info not contained on the actual page.

if you search for "jenson button", then the top page comes out as the official Formula 1 site. No surprises there.
but the snippet contains an image and information about his season standing, performance in the last race, and who he drives for.
that information does not appear on the actual page IN THAT FORMAT - it has been culled and rewritten by google to provide the user with more information, before he clicks through.

does anyone think this is fair? google is supposed to be an index, and the snippet is supposed to contain information from the page. but now it seems that they are scraping content from the page, rewriting the snippets into a handy little information box, and presenting it to the user.

this is the way that it's heading. they are trying to give the user their own information before they click through to the site. they want to keep the user at google, and stop them clicking through.

[tedster]

1. Try Tiger Woods, or any big name athlete. It's the same kind of thing, with the little icon specific to their sport. This is the kind of thing I've come to expect from Google.

2. Count how many total places there are for all the individual results - I see 14

3. Now that Bing is integrating with Wolfram¦Alpha [webmasterworld.com], you'll probably be seeing similar "information engine" results over there, too.

4. When it comes to ideas of fairness - well, Google has never run a contest for webmasters to compete in. That's just the way we sometimes think about it. They are giving answers to searches - "organizing the world's information", you know?

5. Titles and snippets have been creatively constructed in many ways for quite a while. The sites involved in this sports icon listing are the official organizations for the given sport. I suppose it's up to them to take action if they feel Google is being abusive in some way. My bet is they actually like it - their links look pretty prominent.

[londrum]

They are giving answers to searches

that's the change. they used to be an index, telling us where we could find the answers. but now they are actually providing the answers themselves

...but they are taking those answers from us. in the jenson button example, i'm guessing that the information has actually been scrapped from the page. because it would be confusing to the user for the snippet to contain information that differs from the page.

it's as if they're saying "if the website's snippet doesn't contain the answer that the user seeks, then we'll just re-write the snippet and give it to them ourselves."

i've just had a thought about why only the top site gets their snippet rewritten...

google wants to keep the user on site, and prevent them from clicking out through a non-money making serp listing. i can't remember the actual percentage, but i'm guessing about 50% of their users will disappear through the site at position no.1.
so if google wants to keep the user on site, they have to stop them clicking out through the first site. which they do by providing them with the information they came for.

they are trying to reduce the percentage of people clicking out through position 1.
why go to the official formula 1 site, when you can go to google and read their info there? that is what they're trying to do.

it would be interesting to find out whether anyone who has a top position for a sports star has seen a drop in traffic.