Re:Google to stop showing news snippets for French users
by timwaagh on Saturday September 28, 2019 @06:04AM
(#21099488)
It may be counterproductive but in a way those publishers always held the rights to their own work. Consequently if they want to prevent Google from showing snippets they should be able to. But maybe that should be opt out, rather than opt in. I expect most of them to request Google to use snippets again before very long in any case.
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Re:Google to stop showing news snippets for French users
by zmix on Saturday September 28, 2019 @06:40AM
(#21099606)
> Consequently if they want to prevent Google from showing snippets they should be able to.
They were!
From https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/79812?hl=en
<meta name="googlebot" content="..., ..." />
These meta tags control the behavior of search engine crawling and indexing.
nosnippet - Don't show a text snippet or video preview from being shown in
the search results. For video, a static image will be shown instead, if
possible. Example: <meta name="robots" content="nosnippet">
max-snippet:[number] - Limit the text snippet length for this page to [number]
characters; specify 0 for no snippet or -1 to allow any snippet length.
Re:Google to stop showing news snippets for French users
by realusername on Saturday September 28, 2019 @06:28AM
(#21099567)
They already can, they just leave the meta tags with an empty string and nothing will show up.
Re:Google to stop showing news snippets for French users
by kozhevnikov on Saturday September 28, 2019 @06:22AM
(#21099539)
It should be a simple robots.txt setting (i.e. indexed but without snippets) available to any publisher and content creator in any country.
Re:Google to stop showing news snippets for French users
by zmix on Saturday September 28, 2019 @06:43AM
(#21099622)
It is already. And in addition to that, since 'robots.txt' is being considered to broad and too 'out of time', Google offers meta tags, that their bot evaluates. They did this long time before the EU direction.