Google Snippets

Google snippets are meant to be peeping holes that give users a taste of the content in a certain link to a certain website. But IMHO these snippets are not good enough: sometimes they miss the point, other times they mislead. Maybe people got used to it and think it is incorrigible, but there must be a way to make the life of the millions that use Google (and all other main search engines) snippets easier.

For example, here are four links about Project Quaero. the snippets look almost the same, but when I entered them they were different - so Google didn't help me choose the one that gives me what I want better than the others and I needed to open them all and find it out by myself.

Search results for project quaero
1. http://timworstall.typepad.com/timworstall/2005/08/project_quaero.html Tim Worstall: Project Quaero
o Project Quaero, a truly European search engine. ... Dubbed "Project Quaero", from the Latin word meaning "to seek", the programme will be fleshed out in

2. http://searchviews.com/archives/2005/08/project_quaero.php SearchViews: Project Quaero - Eurocentric Search Engine for France
o It's called Project Quaero which is Latin for "hard to spell" (also 'to seek') and the full program will be explained in detail later this month. ...

3. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/main.jhtml?xml=/money/2005/08/31/cnsearch31.xml&menuId=242&sSheet=+/money/2005/08/31/ixcity.html Telegraph | Money | Chirac backs eurocentric search engine
o Dubbed "Project Quaero", from the Latin word meaning "to seek", the programme will be fleshed ... Although Project Quaero does not yet have a formal budget, ...

4.http://www.marketingvox.com/archives/2005/09/01/frenchfunded_quaero_to_tackle_google_yahoo/index.php French-Funded 'Quaero' to Tackle Google, Yahoo • MarketingVOX
o The program has been dubbed "Project Quaero" (Latin for "to seek"). ... Project Quaero does not yet have a formal budget, but will be financed by the ...

I checked what do other people think about Google snippets and found out that they are quite satisfied with it - does it mean that they are right and I am wrong?

http://dotnet.org.za/craig/archive/2004/09/20/4119.aspx
The Secret Source of Goggle's Power
“An overlooked feature that made Google really cool in the beginning was their snippets. This is the excerpt of text that shows a few sample sentences from each web page matching your search. Google's snippets show just the part of the web page that have your search terms in them; other search engines before always showed the same couple of sentences from the start of the web page, no matter what you had searched for.
Consider the insane cost to implement this simple feature. Google has to keep a copy of every web page on the Internet on their servers in order to show you the piece of the web page where your search terms hit…This means…lot of memory.”

http://birdhouse.org/blog/archives/2004/04/
Ludovic comments on the above source:
Fascinating and detailed post about Google's datacenter, now 100,000 servers strong. … I didn't realize that Google's "Snippets" service requires them to store the entire web in RAM. Speculation about the ultimate capabilities of such an unimaginably huge cluster computer. A commenter wonders "How many servers would you need to emulate the human brain?"

http://www.translatorscafe.com/cafe/Articles.asp?ArtID=29
Marie-Pierre Lessard says that
Thanks to Google's snippets and ranking technology, a simple keyword search often bears highly relevant results, which can be surveyed at a glance. Google snippets are often sufficiently clear and complete to provide a defining context or even a definition extracted from an online glossary.

http://blog.outer-court.com/forum/4381.html
Juan asks Philipp :
Could you make a Google interface where the size of the snippet is larger, I mean you get more text around the keywords you entered?

http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum30/28941-3-10.htm
HughMungus says:
Just like the example I've given of how you can get information out of google snippets without ever visiting the web page of the site the snippet is from (for example, if you want a local restaurant's phone number, just type in the name and the area code and the number is almost guaranteed to be in the snippets -- no reason to visit the site it's on.

http://www.library.uiuc.edu/blog/scholcomm/archives/2005/11/in_defense_of_t.html
In Defense of the Google Print Project
…nor has Google defined what a "snippet" is: a paragraph? A page? A chapter? A whole book?...
Comment. Nine quick replies. (1) A snippet is a fair-use excerpt. If you think Google's snippets are too long to count as fair use, then the AAP should scale back its lawsuit to the demand that snippets be short enough to count as fair use. Right now the AAP is trying to halt the whole project regardless of fair use.