The snippets feature has always seemed somewhat shady to me -- in essence, it steals pageviews from the websites that did the hard work of sourcing the information.
This is where regulation needs to happen. It makes no sense for a website or a group of websites to pick a fight with google over this, but a union or a government entity needs to step in and make sure google pays for this. They should set 5% of their ad revenue to pay publishers for snippets.
From my (probably naive) point of view this does seem like a useful feature for users. If you can get an accurate answer for your query without clicking on a link or having to grep the linked page for the answer that's a win in my book and a time save for users. I guess an issue arises when the snippet is _not_ correct. But in my personal experience, the snippets are usually pretty helpful/accurate
Snippets are indeed a useful feature to have, but Google should share some of the ad revenue it generates with the publishers of the featured content snippets.
They do indeed generate revenue for the publishers, because a fraction of the users actually click through into the article. Without the snippet promoting it, the article would see much fewer traffic from Google.
The snippet is almost always generated from the first search result, which garners the lion’s share of the clicks. Now, many find what they were looking for in the snippet and forego the click.
The tricky thing about search AdWords, different from AdSense, is that for search AdWords, ad revenue comes in when the search results are bad.
Snippets generate revenue due to brand loyalty in the from of future searches.
Google's mission is to organize all of the world's information (and then find a way to charge rent)