Why is Web Preview a Snippet and not an Archive?

[incrediBILL]

I would like to address some of silliest idiocy Google has trotted out in years, which is classifying the instant preview feature as a "snippet".

The only way to stop the instant preview is to install "nosnippet" in the page, at which time you also lose the ability to have snippets below your titles in the SERPs.

[google.com...]

Duh?

Technically, instant preview is a visually cached copy and any site set to NOARCHIVE is currently being violated because it's making and displaying archives of the site. The same reasons you don't want people looking at your cache, such as correcting pricing mistakes, taking down content that violated copyright, whatever, the reason you don't want cache and snoops evaluating it still apply with instant preview.

Eliminating all snippets is idiotic just to eliminate instant preview.

Can't we get a new directive NOPREVIEW, come on Google, common sense time, instant preview and snippets are MUTUALLY EXCLUSIVE.

I weep for the future.

[TheMadScientist]

+1 ... Not much even I can add to that!

[Samizdata]

Eliminating all snippets is idiotic just to eliminate instant preview

Idiotic to webmasters, sure, but "pour encourager les autres" for Google Inc.

They don't want you to opt out, and they made it unattractive to do so.

any site set to NOARCHIVE is currently being violated

I won't argue with that, but I am suddenly reminded of something called Blekko.

Can't we get a new directive NOPREVIEW, come on Google, common sense time

One of my posts on this subject from 22 November 2010 says:
"As for offering a "nopreview" tag, they wouldn't want to copy Bing, would they?"

I weep for the future

Sadly, I think you are probably crying over spilt milk.

Any fuss over Google Web Preview died out six months ago.

As an issue, it's an ex-parrot.

...

[incrediBILL]

Any fuss over Google Web Preview died out six months ago.

That's not true.

I've just begun to fuss.

Last time I had a big fuss we solved 302 hijacking with round trip DNS googlebot validation.

I'm just getting fussy ;)

[Samizdata]

I'm just getting fussy

I wish you every success, as always.

If you can get the proprietary NOARCHIVE made a standard, even better.

...

[tedster]

I am suddenly reminded of something called Blekko

Yeah, me too. For them, noarchive means noindex. Sheesh guys, will both of you please give the world a break. A commonsense standard for noarchive is definitely in order.

[TheMadScientist]

A commonsense standard for noarchive is definitely in order.

IMO A common sense standard for search engines and their 'desired markup' is in order.

Why on earth do they all need to create their own new ways to have us markup our pages for them to take them apart and use them? Ridiculous ... They all want to use our content to make money and they can't even get together and agree on some simple markup we can all use that 'works' for all of them.

With Yahoo! you can (or could) say 'do not count this section' (or something to that effect), with Bing you can say nopreview, with Blekko noarchive means noindex ... Is it really that tough for them to just sit down and agree to some standards for us to follow so everything will 'mean' the same thing to all of them?

Personally, I think it would make things easier and better for all of us ... Them included.

[Webnauts]

Why don't you tell Google Web Preview to go home, adding in your .htaccess file the lines:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^(.*)Preview(.*)$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ [google.com...] [R=301,L]

[netmeg]

[unprintable remark]

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

My site has a noarchive meta tag primarily to stop the wayback machine from offering my site content to scrapers, it became a problem some time ago.

While I'd like to complain that Google is violating that directive I can't ignore that since Google has made it a feature in serps I can't have my site results appear "lacking".

The REAL problem is all of the additional features search engines think they need to add to serps, search is becoming as convoluted as most social networks.

Did you know... that youtube videos actually play in the preview?

[pageoneresults]

My site has a noarchive meta tag primarily to stop the wayback machine from offering my site content to scrapers.

Hmmm, I didn't realize NoArchive prevented the Wayback Machine from archiving. I always thought you had to be specific and include this in robots.txt...

User-agent: ia_archiver
Disallow: /

Great topic IncrediBILL! I dig it when you get fussy.

[Brett_Tabke]

Previous thread on the issue from last fall:
[webmasterworld.com...]

Screen shot of what what we are talking about.
[pubcon.com...]

@Webnauts risky. Any time you block google spiders for anything - you risk consequences on SERPs. This has to be something Google addresses from their side. I would bet, Google uses these screen shots internally for hand checks on sites.

> A commonsense standard for noarchive is definitely in order

We have one - please see your favorite law book under the phrase, Copyright Law.

[londrum]

it will be worse when they make the preview readable.
at least at the moment its still pretty useless. people can't really get any info from it. they still have to visit your site.

compare that with the way they do google images. they show the full image and hide your page underneath. the user doesnt really have to visit your page at all now.

if they ever change previews so its akin to the way they do images, then that will be the time to kick up a fuss


ps... aren't the images produced on the fly? that is probably why they can get away with ignoring noarchive, because its not archived.

[Samizdata]

please see your favorite law book under the phrase, Copyright Law.

For easy reference, here is the US Copyright Office summary of the "fair use" doctrine:

[copyright.gov...]

...

[Samizdata]

they can get away with ignoring noarchive, because its not archived

They can get away with ignoring NOARCHIVE because it is proprietary and means whatever they say it means. Blekko and others can use it to mean something entirely different.

In my tests last year the preview image appeared to be cached on Google servers.

...

[TheMadScientist]

I personally find this interesting:
(Emphasis Mine)

4. The effect of the use upon the potential market for, or value of, the copyrighted work

...

Acknowledging the source of the copyrighted material does not substitute for obtaining permission.

...

When it is impracticable to obtain permission, use of copyrighted material should be avoided unless the doctrine of fair use would clearly apply to the situation.

See Preceding Reference to CopyRight.Gov for Source and Additional Information.

[incrediBILL]

that is probably why they can get away with ignoring noarchive

Well it sure isn't a snippet either!

Why should opting out of image preview force you to lose your snippet?

For a bunch of PhDs this is about as dumb as dirt, they should go back to K-mart get those degrees refunded.

[numnum]

The only way to stop the instant preview is to install "nosnippet" in the page, at which time you also lose the ability to have snippets below your titles in the SERPs.

So if you've installed "nosnippet" and if you've provided a description META tag, will the SERP show the description below your page title?

[TheMadScientist]

A snippet is a text excerpt that appears below a page's title in our search results and describes the content of the page.

...

You can, however, specify that Google should not show a snippet (in which case neither the text snippet nor the preview icon will appear).

Not according to the the Webmaster Tools Help resource linked in the OP of this thread.

[incrediBILL]

Just to clarify, did a preview in Google of a page, checked my server logs, there was no hit on my server, it's pulling the image from some Google cache server.

It is an unauthorized archive of my page.

'Nuff said.

Not that I really mind the preview so much, although the meta controls are idiotic, but now they're double and triple dipping my bandwidth because they aren't smart enough to collect all the data in one pass.

Now I get googlebot and preview both downloading pages, plus the image bot and preview both downloading images. Not to mention they aren't clever enough to use images already downloaded as they appear to wipe the cache clear in their preview browser every time so it just escalates.

Pardon me Google but who's paying for this bandwidth, me or you?

[edited by: incrediBILL at 8:10 pm (utc) on May 21, 2011]

[netmeg]

Yep, cause I'm no-archived, and the preview shows older content than what is currently on three of my sites.

Let's make a big ass stink.

[walkman]

There's another small but very popular company that provides 'domain tools' that stores full 'thumbnails' of your index page. You cannot remove them, unless you sue but who has the time or money. A lot can be written on the first page that do not want someone to see 1-10 years from now.

@Bret, why would Google use this to rate sites? It has no functionality, can't even tell if the links pass PR or not. I guess you can still see a lot and save on space but it isn't the same.

[londrum]

Just to clarify, did a preview in Google of a page, checked my server logs, there was no hit on my server, it's pulling the image from some Google cache server.

if you look in the source code its not actually an image, its one of those fancy base64 things. so i suppose they could argue that they aren't actually storing an image, just a simple text string.

like this... which is a little yellow star

<img src="data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhDwAPAKIAAPz8neq/B96IBgAAAP///
wAAAAAAAAAAACH5BAEAAAQALAAAAAAPAA8AAANASLo0/
GwAB5+kVckwswYcpg3kFoQlCazgebLd4M4zJgt4LgRiE+i7ng/
Ig9x2uGIEsOOdBJ2FjOcgnUQlC0mRAAA7">

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 7:19 am (utc) on May 22, 2011]
[edit reason] fixed side-scroll [/edit]

[tedster]

walkman, in 2008 Google partnered with that domain tools website as the provider of whois information for the SERPs (whois example.com queries.) The two companies are pretty tight.

[edited by: tedster at 3:55 am (utc) on May 23, 2011]

[TheMadScientist]

...i suppose they could argue...

I'm sure they've got all their arguments figured out, and whether it's 'play stupid' (street view - they 'didn't know'), 'blame the algo' (suggestions - 'the algo generates those, we can't control it'), 'it's the visitors, not us' (previews - stated on this page: [sites.google.com...] or some new garbage they spin up about how and why they're right or it's 'technically' okay, the bottom line is: It's still 'not cool', imo. (Preceding quotes paraphrased.)

But what do they really care? We're just a bunch of webmasters supplying them with content they use, revise (titles & snippets) and reuse (archives and previews) to even have a company ... It's not like we pay their bills or anything, right?

<sarcasm>
I'm sure they don't really use those previews and snippets to generate income, it just looks that way to some of us ... I'm equally sure there's no way those previews could have any negative impact on a site's traffic and therefore negatively impact the value of the copyrighted work they present (presumably) under the guise of the doctrine of fair use either.
</sarcasm>

[edited by: TheMadScientist at 9:31 pm (utc) on May 21, 2011]

[agent_x]

ps... aren't the images produced on the fly? that is probably why they can get away with ignoring noarchive, because its not archived.

The snapshots of the pages are not produced on the fly, I can definitely say that.

However, the preview image you actually see is produced on the fly because they draw an orange box around the block or blocks of text on your page that contain the search terms.

[walkman]

Tedster the name got $%#@.

As for Google, they don't need to explain anything, until it's bad for their image. They'll do it and take the chance that no one will sue or win. See youtube, Book scanning, now music cloud, scrapping reviews (ask Yelp!), scrapping answers so users stay on Google, purposefully selling [edit] adsfor illegal pharmas etc etc.

[edited by: walkman at 9:45 pm (utc) on May 21, 2011]

[Webnauts]

Brett_Tabke, I do not understand where the risk can be. I clearly state that I block any user-agent that includes the term "Preview".

Can you be more specific how can that be a risk?

In addition, with that idea I can change the URL to a more inviting page for people to see in the search results.

[Samizdata]

I can change the URL to a more inviting page for people to see in the search results

Technically simple to do, but it invites retribution from Google who indicated via their belatedly-launched FAQ that doing so "may cause your site to be perceived as deceptive and removed from the Google index".

Before that I was serving a splendid generic preview image for one of my sites.

All the text on it was very readable (as intended).

Google obviously could not allow this to continue as it was so open to abuse.

...

[indyank]

Not to mention they aren't clever enough to use images already downloaded as they appear to wipe the cache clear in their preview browser every time so it just escalates.

do you think they aren't clever? It is all done with a purpose.