The conservative party massively expanded the copyright of publishers (German legislation: Leistungsschutzrecht - English http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancillary_copyright_for_press_p... ) and some of the larger publishers then started to demand payments from Google for including snippets in its news services. Google reacted by removing all those publishers from their news indexes and services.
Somewhere down the line even the dumbest of those publishers must have realised (they've been receiving 80%+ of their traffic via Google) that the laws pushed through by their sock puppets in Berlin did not give them the additional extra risk free payments they had expected (for the work of others - in this case Google). Hint to the publishers: Understand how the (distribution) medium works before you write yourself some dreamy business plans.
To my know by now almost all of those publishers have paddled back and have given Google free licenses so that they again will be included in the index - Question: Will they provided the same free licenses to other search engines or web sites? - looks like this should be another example for an overall review of the legality of these publisher friendly regulation vs fair use & censorship. It will then be another change of legislation pushed through for "special interest groups" by the current government and it's last 2 predecessors that has been declared unconstitutional.
The latest step in this play was the EU Parliament vote on breaking up Google (http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/nov/27/european-p...) - I wonder who paid for that vote.