I am talking about the text that is shown right of search results on Google.com.
For institutions, universities this is often the first sentence from Wikipedia. For countries it is not.
When I search for the whole sentence
Germany is a Western European country with a terrain of vast forests, rivers and mountain ranges, and 2 millennia of history
there are only four places on the web that contain it, none of which is Wikipedia or any known institution.
Are these text snippets statistically generated summaries? If so, what information does Google provide about generating them?