Google previews meanings

[VictorVC]

I have noticed that when I do a site:mysite.com search and all my indexed pages come up, that when I hover over the arrows and bring up the previews some of the pages have things in a red rectangle and some of the pages even have zig zag-like tears/perforations running through them. What do these signify?

[bobjones]

As far as I know, the red rectangles highlight all sections of a page that have the keyword or phrase which you used in your search query.

[KeriMorgret]

The zig-zag tears are just showing that they've snipped part of the middle of the page out -- they're showing you stuff that matches your query at the top and bottom of your pages, and removing some of the stuff from the middle that doesn't match your query.

You'll see the same thing in print regarding graphs if something is taken out of the X-axis.