When will Rich Snippets become widely available?

Matt's answer:

CUTTS: Adeel from Manchester, UK, asks, “When do you reckon Rich Snippets will be made widely available? Can I suggest a tool in Webmaster Tools that lets you view or preview Rich Snippets from your site?” It’s a good suggestion. The fact is we’re going to take it slowly at first to sort of make sure that people are doing good things with Rich Snippets. For example, you could imagine going crazy with Rich Snippets and it might actually cause the click through to go down, you know, if users didn’t like those sorts of Rich Snippets, so, we’ve been relatively cautious. My expectation is that we’re going to check out sites and sort of, at least at first, sort of, initially, sort of white list them so that, okay, this site is the next one to receive Rich Snippets and this one is the next one. But as we grow more confident that it doesn’t hurt the user experience and that the users like it, I expect us to continue to roll that out more and more broadly. So, there is documentation. You can go ahead and read up on it. And a lot of the Rich Snippets are of a pretty understandable type, for example, the number of stars on a review and things like that. So, you can usually get a pretty good idea of what your Snippets are going to look like just from looking at what Snippets from other site already look like, and that will give you an idea what it’ll look like when it goes live for your site.

by Matt Cutts - Google's Head of Search Quality Team

Original video: