Slashdot Mirror
Google May Limit Free News Access
You know how, if you want to read a paywalled newspaper article, you can just paste its title into Google News and get a free pass? Those days may be coming to an end. Reader Captian Spazzz writes: "It looks like Google may be bowing to pressure from folks like News Corp.'s Rupert Murdoch. What I don't understand is what prevents the websites themselves from enforcing some limit. Why make Google do it?" (Danny Sullivan explains how they could do that.) "Newspaper publishers will now be able to set a limit on the number of free news articles people can read through Google, the company has announced. The concession follows claims from some media companies that the search engine is profiting from online news pages. Publishers will join a First Click Free programme that will prevent web surfers from having unrestricted access. Users who click on more than five articles in a day may be routed to payment or registration pages."
Presumably there'll be a cookie to remove, or a BugMeNot account, or a way of creating/managing the 50 accounts needed to read as before.
Most 'papers like Google and the visitors Google sends them; so the Google Bot and hits with a google.com Referer tend to get a free pass. Use this to your advantage:
or just go with the flow.
If your papers have the value of a Vogue or economist economist, its fine.
Making google change its practice world wide it fit in with your paper and ink world is rather silly.
Value add, be faster and better, play a FOX game or sink.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
"can visit one article a day.."
great thanks
look, either get behind a paywall and disappear or dont!, the rest of us dont really care as we will just get our news from somewhere who doesnt put up walls and doesnt want the web looking like a version of TV
thats why i like the web, its a level playing field and because of that it pisses off big business no end
I personally think this is such a great move, I'm so sick of newspapers, reporting all the negative stuff. I say Ban them all :)
Take the power back !
... when we have public broadcasters, such as the BBC, ABC and so.
the final nail in the coffin of the 'traditional' news dissemination business model. One that relied on having to purchase a physical (print) medium and that has not been able to adapt to the Internet-era. This is also a consciousness-switch of the traditional users: information wants to be free and they want it accordingly. To try to force people to actually pay for content they can have for free (regardless of what Google, Murdoch etc. do), is almost laughable in terms of failing to accept the inevitable. In fact, it will accelerate it.
However, I do wonder about the journalists and writers...what is the way for them to make money if news and stories are only accepted for free? There is a large effort needed to write quality stories...a lot of calling people, driving around interviewing, checking documents etc.pp. So far the newspapers/-agencies were, for a writer, the customers and they paid based on length etc. If they falter, what will happen? Suggestions?
People used to get their news by looking for a news brand like BBC or The Times, and reading stuff that was presented under that brand. Now a lot of people look for news under topics that interest them, and skip between news brands doing so. What google is offering to do will have little effect on such news browsers, who will have a choice of several competing free links under their topic of interest. People linking to interesting stories will simply copy and paste the content they wish to discuss.
The print industry is dead and just doesn't know it yet.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
Anything which reduces the readership of Murdoch's media is a good thing.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
I'm still utterly baffled by what's going on here, and neither article seems to answer my questions. Since, in most cases, Google News only displays a snippet of the article (almost certainly fair use?) and then requires readers to click through to the actual web site of the news source to read the rest of the article, what is preventing those sites from implementing whatever access control scheme they feel like? (This should have nothing at all to do with robots.txt or ACAP which is about whether the *Google spider* can see the content, not whether users linking from Google can.) Am I missing some technical point?
TFA says
"Previously, each click from a user would be treated as free," Google senior business product manager Josh Cohen said in a blog post.
So it sounds like (maybe?) the news sites have a policy that says that clickthroughs from Google don't have to be routed through their access control. Why? Is this something Google requires newspapers to do in order to do display links to them on Google News? This seems to be the best theory, but I didn't see anything anywhere that actually said that.
So, in sum, is this a technical or a social/legal/contractual issue, and what, exactly, is it that is preventing these news sites from using their normal access control?
Easy. Google wants access to the data, and doesn't want to be shut out. Therefore, it's in their interest to implement something that appeases the Murdochs of the world. I don't quite think people understand just how much influence and clout Murdoch (and people like him) have in the world. More fundamentally, from Murdoch's point of view, if Google does it, then the changes can apply to all newspapers, including his competitors. If only Murdoch's news empire does it, then there is less chance of other newspapers following the trend. I suspect Murdoch does not want that many competitors offering free news, and actively wants to encourage the vast majority of newspapers out there to adopt a similar pay-per-view model, because that means that it's a fairly level playing field in terms of competition. So, if you get Google to do it, it encourages everyone else to follow along.
This all reminds me of a nice little lesson from history when the thriving independent press were shut out a few hundred years ago because of spiralling costs. Advertising became the big funder of newspapers back then, and those that attracted the most funding were able to crush all competition. Independents simply couldn't compete with the rocketing costs of machinery, distribution etc. The market became a wonderful tool of censorship. I won't be surprised to see this having a similar effect ie. shutting down a lot of independents who rely on free news for commentary. Difficult to predict, but it's worth thinking about. I hope I'm wrong.
Always knew that having an advertising company as the gatekeeper to knowledge on the internet was a bad idea.
'If Christ had tweeted the sermon on the mount, it might have lasted until nightfall.' - John Perry Barlow
I would pay for the newspaper from time to time. That meant $.25. Somewhat recently it was increased to $.50 and my purchase of the newspaper was greatly reduced. When they raised the price to $.75 per paper, I stopped buying.
If they charge for online access, I guess I will just stop reading news altogether and just listen to the radio like I have been for the last two years.
I mean really eff that, first place my mouse goes to on a registration page is the little X in the corner.
Bugmenot here we come! Failing free registration, Slashdot hackers please take an interest in Bugmenot!
Why not let the senile man put a stop to Google's web spider and see how long his rags last without people going to them to read the articles (and ads). If Murdoch thinks people will pay for his content, he will be "surprised" that they won't, that's why The Times became a free online newspaper in the first place, not enough were willing to pay for the content he had locked up in 6 monthly updated CD-ROM article archives (and the one week expiry of news articles before they were "archived").
Take Nobody's Word For It.
"Users who click on more than five articles in a day may be routed to payment or registration pages."
How? If I don't have cookies turned on (I usually don't), how are they tracking this? By IP number? Anyone with half a brain knows that doesn't correspond to users.
The most likely outcome if they do implement it (effectively or ineffectively) is that fewer people will bother to visit. There are already sites that are paywalled that turn up in Google searches. Once I get to know which ones they are I don't even click on the link when it comes up in the list because I know it's a waste of my time.
Who needs an alternative of BBC? They are simply the best out there. I for one am willing to pay their licence even though I do not live in the UK. Just broadcast me all their channels and I'll pay. I have not watched any other television in 9 years. I tried the local channels (Dutch) a few times and got sick by the ads. Can't stand them!
Users can adapt to unneeded contents and eventualy they'll stop apearing online.
Yes, it's called a positive externality. News sites make web pages available, other web sites link to them. What's the problem? That's how the web is supposed to work.
... a big corporate newspaper is like any big corporation. They will strangle any competency they might happen to have in their "IT" department with silly rules, silly procedures, and excessive busywork on pointless efforts to satisfy some big whig in an office no techie would ever be allowed to see. Make their own server smart enough to limit and restrict viewers to just specific content they want to be free? Thousands of Slashdot readers could probably implement and deploy. But it would never happen in those big businesses.
If some newspaper simply wants to NOT allow Google visitors, then Google should just cut them off, entirely, like they don't exist. No news links, no search links, nothing. They don't exist on the net. Maybe these newspapers should see just how much their traffic falls when that happens. Hey, if it doesn't, then it didn't matter.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Let's face it: many of us are now addicted and dependent on google on daily basis. Take it away from us 'as is' and it will be disaster, panic, riots, etc..
Some name this the consequence of a monopoly, only for once the subject is not M$, but google. Or Newscorp???
I think this is fine. But I suggest Google then allow me the option to remove articles that I cannot freely access.
Participatory Governance : The only feasible option for a real democracy, where everyone really does have a say.
Users who click on more than five articles in a day may be routed to payment or registration pages
Users who click on more than five articles in day may be routed to another news site.
Having read the article, this seems like a reasonable plan. Not only does it push those who read lots to pay, it also leaves some pretty good options for those who want to read lots, but don't want to/can't pay. That's all you can really ask for. These people need to earn a living somehow, and I'd rather they did it writing news articles than working on a factory line.
www.eissq.com/BandP.html Ball and Plate System. Amuse your friends. Crush your enemies.
Why is this a YRO story? In all seriousness, it's a "newspaper's rights online." They have every right to do with their content what they wish. If they suffer financially for their decisions, then it serves them right. But there's no inherent right to free access to the content they produce.
Bark less. Wag more.
Google search, Google scholar etc always turns up paywalled articles outside of the news industry. In particular, research articles. On clicking through your are greeted by a screen to pay for the article, and the keywords that were searched for are not in the summary/abstract presented or even available to see. In effect Google has given me a "hit" on my search then led me to a place where not even the search terms are present... Google crawler has access to it but I do not.
ieeecomputersociety.org, springerlink.com, sciencedirect.com (anything but direct)... the list goes on.
Ok, you might say that they hold all the serious research papers - you might even be right, in some cases. I even understand that maybe just maybe, if I am really desperate, then I might actually want to search for paywalled articles and am prepared to pay the extra information access tax of $20-$40 a for every article. However what google is now doing is wasting their bandwidth and more importantly to me, completely wasting my time by including paywalled articles in top positions of all my search requests. Furthermore, Google does it by default.
I have written to their support, posted on their forums -please Google - if you are listening - MAKE PAYWALLED SITES AN OPTION in my preferences and set it OFF by default. If you think about where it leads: the quality of the future of all our search requests is at stake. Now Google is planning to add News to this time wasting highly annoying practice - and I want to be opted out by default, I am begging you!
Did anyone notice that the ad on /. is an anti-Obama ad, that then links to a newsmax "poll"?
photo
Well, of COURSE if you have that pic, with that message, the only people who will participate will be rabidly anti-Obama. Kind of makes for a nice poll, Newsmax, right? Of course, that *couldn't* be the purpose, now could it?
LAME.
www.eissq.com/BandP.html Ball and Plate System. Amuse your friends. Crush your enemies.
A question: If their crawler has unfettered access to the content then how are they supposed to know that it is a paywalled site? I have read before that if you set your user agent to the same as the Google Crawler that you would get into these sites that allow indexing, but don't allow "users" to browse for free. Not that you should have to do this, but if it does indeed work it really does leave me with "how would Google even know they have a paywall?". I don't expect them to have a staff of people visiting web pages to check. Perhaps they could visit each site they index twice? Once with their normal user agent, and once with it set to say FireFox - and compare the results? But that would cost them a lot in time and bandwidth.
I'm sure China will have English language papers online for free. There are lots of people that want to push subsidized content. So don't worry you won't have to pay for stuff.
NM
People like Murdoch are dinosaurs who can't adapt to the new reality.
Why would anyone pay to access a news site when coming from Google when there's still little to no chance you'll revisit the site again within the next half year or so. How many such sites do you have to pay, to be guaranteed access?
So basically, this is lip service from Google, designed to break Murdochs collusion attempts, rather than have any benefits at all for newspapers. It's not really a solution at all, like micropayments or an all-news subscription would be.
With full access and quality articles, I would actually be ok with paying for online news. But not if I have to pay 20 different vendors..
I seriously doubt Murdoch will be thrilled about this though.. I would expect him to trash this offer.
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
Ok, I've been using Google News for as long as I can remember. I can't recall *ever* seeing an ad displayed alongside news results. Now if I do a regular search, *then* I see ads. And when I get to the source article, I see ads there, too. Seems like Google is doing someone a service.
I like Google News because I have found it to be the best resource for comparing news stories. I've even found clear cases of plagiarism and reported them to the original author after doing some tracking.
In some circles it is acknowledged that the newspapers provide a news hole as a service. Some have even said that people who read the newspapers aren't the real consumers of the news since advertisers pay for the news and are therefore the consumers. Nearly the entire printed page (except the front page) is advertising and somewhere in the middle, is the actual news. What newspapers have found is that it's nearly impossible to get a good impression (ads on eyeballs) with a web page. Why? I can adjust the size of the type so that the ads are pushed off to the side. With a sight impairment, this is a requirement.
There may also be an ulterior motive: they don't want us checking facts in articles across news sources. Google makes it easy for me to do that. The hits returned on a news story come from a variety of sources and allow me to compare articles for the perspectives and the facts stated. This allows me to form an opinion on a topic of news from a variety of sources instead of just one. The paywall would help to accomplish the goal of limiting my sources on a story. If I'm paying for one, I won't be paying for another and I won't be comparing sources.
So, unless I'm searching the "web" section of Google, Google isn't going to make any money from ads. This issue is clearly missing from the debate, perhaps intentionally so. Google has been *very* clear about making this distinction and seems to be offering a free service to the news outlets on the web. As some have noted, newspapers are dead, they just don't know it yet. I take a different view. Newspapers are just waking up to being wrapped up by a (web) spider, they just don't know what to do yet.
Any minute now they're going to figure out that their beloved paywall finished the job for the spider.
The only question left in my mind is this: Why aren't they complaining about all the other search sites? Why just Google?
The diversity and expression of human opinion is essential to human survival.
What I don't understand is what prevents the websites themselves from enforcing some limit.
What prevents them from enforcing a limit themselves is because they don't actually want a limit enforced. They want the free advertising Except they don't want it free - they want Google to pay them for it, which would be an interesting advertising model.
PROXY
A question: If their crawler has unfettered access to the content then how are they supposed to know that it is a paywalled site?
They already seem to have identified the culprits of poor search hits. If you select their "shopping sites" as an option then you get majority paywalled articles - so they must have already done the work to identify paywalled articles.
This sounds reasonable to me. A newspaper, magazine or some other media outlet is a business. As a business, they need to make revenue to survive. It costs a lot of money to pay people to go out, collect information and write the news that we are all looking for. News articles don't magically appear out of the ether. It takes someone to write that article and that person has to put food on the table and pay the rent/mortgage.
It doesn't take too much brain power to realize that a publication with a circulation of 50,000 (common for many newspapers) selling periodicals at $1 per copy isn't going to be getting much of its income from subscriptions alone. They get most of their income from advertising. And if you want any businesses to advertise with your publication, you need to show data that proves your publication is read by people who are most likely to buy a given business' product. Think about it: if you created a FPS game with highly detailed and lifelike graphics with a free pr0n option and a totally ripping heavy metal acid rock soundtrack, do you really think you are going to make many sales by placing a $2,000 ad in Grannie's Moral Christian Crocheting Magazine?
So, it makes sense to a media outlet to restrict free access to their articles. They need something in exchange for your having free access. Publishers need demographic data to prove to advertisers that they are reaching a particular target audience. If you want access to a publisher's articles for free, than it makes sense that you have to give them something of value, and that is demographic data. If you really like reading a particular publication, then why not subscribe to it? Contrary to what is implied above, these restrictions do not only apply to Google (or /.) users.
Will it work? It might. I may only read two or three articles from any given news site in a single day, so the five-article restriction won't really affect me. If there is a news site that you really like to follow a lot — say, Slashdot for instance — would you register an account with that site? I think it is very likely you would. If there is a site that you dislike and would never follow, then you will probably not want to register. (You might even delete the record of that site from your browser's history file along with any cookies.)
Whew! This water sure is cold!
If they're picky, they mightn't let hits from Google through but still allow the Google bot to index their pages. Change your User-Agent accordingly. In Firefox, go to about:config and change general.useragent.extra.firefox to Googlebot 2.1 and off you go (as Googlebot).
Doing something like this (showing different content by user-agent) is against Google's terms-of-service and can cause your site to be removed from the index.
Google has said that each provider must figure out by itself how to implement this free view limit based on referrer.
The value of Google to Rupert Murdoch (for example) is that he get's page views through them (he doesn't want to admit this in the tack he's taking 'cos he's just after cold hard cash). Google aren't the only source of links for people to find news and those links also influence Google's results.
Once a paywall goes up, people aren't generally going to bother clicking the link. Only subscribers will. In Google this is fine, the site will marked as subscription and people can make up their own mind, but these links will disappear from the results over time (effectively - they'll go further down the rankings) because no one will be linking to them - why would they? People link to news stories as part of a conversation.
The same applies to any newspaper which implements Google's new '5 Clicks & You're Out' system. Once it becomes clear a site is using this, links to it will decrease, readers of link aggregator sites (like Digg) or intelligent and civil discussion boards (like Slashdot) ... *cough* ... will meet links to these sites with complaint "I've already read 5 stories from Your-first-few-hits-R-free-news.com today, is there another link? Why keep linking to these crippled links? FFS!" and either the crippled sites will be routed around (ala bugmenot vs NYT) or become an increasing irrelevance as they cease to be linked to and free-er ccompetitors move in - which are also more easily found and propagated through Google as a result of being more linked.
Google has shifted the game away from itself to let the news sites duke it out but in a different arena. Instead of just competing on quality of stories and journalism, they're going to compete on free and open versus crippled also (paywalled sites are out of the game since they are not part of online conversations).
Valid theory?
Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility. - Ambrose Bierce
I have written to their support, posted on their forums -please Google - if you are listening - MAKE PAYWALLED SITES AN OPTION in my preferences and set it OFF by default.
YES, please. My god I hate this aspect of Google, which is an incredibly annoying time-suck. It's even worse for me because I have a uni account that gives me access to most of the paywalled research, but only when I'm on campus, so when I'm off-campus and I want to know something I just desperately want the option to turn off all that paywalled crap.
This is by far the most hateful, stupid and annoying thing Google does, and in close to a decade of searches I have never once purchased article access from one of these pirates (academics don't get paid by journals for their manuscripts, and now that publishing costs have fallen to almost nothing due to Web delivery there is absolutely no excuse for the kind of rates academic publishers are charging. Open access journals are the future, and the sooner Google gets on board with the future, the better).
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
A fee is NOT a tax and misusing words ala 1984 just makes your arguments less credible.
1) get Firefox
2) get User Agent Switcher extension
3) Set you user agent to googlebot's UA
4) See what google sees
...Perhaps they could visit each site they index twice? Once with their normal user agent, and once with it set to say FireFox - and compare the results? But that would cost them a lot in time and bandwidth.
Not just with a different user-agent, but also with an IP address that doesn't trace back to Google. Some sites do this stuff by inspecting the IP address, rather than the user-agent. Anyway, yes it would cost a lot in bandwidth, but it's pretty much necessary. Otherwise, the SEO types will have a field day feeding stuff to Google that is different from what a human would see.
If it's not indexed yet and you're using Opera: Go to any Google page, press Ctrl + U, change any one link's href to the article's URI, click "Save Changes", click the link and off you go (with a fake Google referer. This works for any fake referer, by the way).
Is there a Firefox plugin to be able to do that?
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
A fee is NOT a tax and misusing words ala 1984 just makes your arguments less credible.
No offense, but I suspect that your not aware of the issues involved. We have already payed for the vast majority of the research articles indirectly through taxation. Outside the US this is even more true. Considering this then yes, my statement is correct that the fee is nothing more than an extra tax on top of what we have already paid for. But it is besides the point anyway - we are supposed to be talking about News, and with news I don't need nor want paywalled sites in my searches be default - they are not giving me what I searched for so why should it be included in my search results, why is Google complacent and happy to keep wasting time, bandwidth of its users?
This does work in some cases (when the sites don't check IP addresses - most of the most popular ones do now) - but your work around does not help stop the steady debasement of search result quality as more and more companies outside of the research article industry setup these paywalled schemes. Do you really want the first two pages of your search results behind a paywall - even if you can work around the problem for some of them? What ticks me off is that you usually don't realize it is paywalled until after you have clicked through.
Are you sure your university doesn't give you a login to use to access journals off-campus?
This is by far the most hateful, stupid and annoying thing Google does, and in close to a decade of searches I have never once purchased article access from one of these pirates (academics don't get paid by journals for their manuscripts, and now that publishing costs have fallen to almost nothing due to Web delivery there is absolutely no excuse for the kind of rates academic publishers are charging.
I hear your pain, cursed googles paywalled roadblocks in my search results once too many. Same boat here but no way I am going to make a trip to campus, especially since in many cases the article is freely and legally available elsewhere - but due to all the paywalled crap sitting in the top page or two of my results, it just takes waaay longer to look up the information. How the hell do they scam their way into the top search positions anyway when you can only get into their fortress of anti-information via a campus or similar?
Open access journals are the future, and the sooner Google gets on board with the future, the better)
I'll second that.
Who needs an alternative of BBC? They are simply the best out there
Alternatives is good even if they are bad. If BBC was to turn a blind spot on a important matter, you would never know without alternatives. But I agree with you, BBC is very good source for news.
http://www.intellipool.se/ - Intellipool Network Monitor
Are you sure your university doesn't give you a login to use to access journals off-campus?
and if they do, please post it to BugMeNot.
Looks like Murdoch came through...
That old Google saying, "don't be evil" must not be true anymore.
Individuals must choose, decide their "essential" nature rather than having it given from some transcendent source.
...articles I am going to read a day: 5
I say bring it.
With IEEE you can't get the article in question anywhere else.
For news, you can read the "michael jackson is dead" story from anywhere. Furthermore, society benefits as a whole if we can get away from the news sources we currently have.
-- I was raised on the command line, bitch
I wish there were a way to exclude pay-walled pages from the search results. What do you think about it, Google?
why not just switch search engines?
Free market and all that.
ps if you don't need a lot of articles you can just email the authors and they will send you the paper for free.
The Grey Goo disaster happened 3 billion years ago. This rock is covered in self replicating machines!
I can see why it annoys you when the main Google index does this, but I thought that was the point of Google Scholar. In hte Scholar preferences you can set your organization and Google Scholar will then route you through your institution's authentication and link resolver systems which will provide access to the content your institution has paid for.
I googled the "new" First Click Free program and see references to it from 2007! (probably before that). So that part has been around a long time. So what is actually new? Well since the BBC doesn't post their sources because they are old-media, here is the 5 per day feature in the First Click Free program announcement. So the loophole that they are closing is being able to do the first-click over and over all day (defeatable the same way other tracking mechanisms are defeatable, i.e. not logging in, disabling cookies, etc). I didn't find that to be clear from the summary or TFA.
With IEEE you can't get the article in question anywhere else.
Thats a myth. Yes Its true in some cases (even research going back into the 80's!) but sure you can get it elsewhere, especially when it comes to quality research. One example of many will cost you a cool $30 from IEEE. But why pay IEEE's extremely high, no value added gatekeeper taxes when you can get the same research from a better source, for free (as it should be).
Interesting side note: AFAIK all physics research is open access - at least the physicists have got it right - you would think that at least the computer scientists would have been the ones to get a clue and stop supporting these scams. But then I suppose they did invent http.
IEEE is one of the worst offenders of paywalled search results clogging up my google searches and making my information searches slow and painful. I would so love to have them drop off the face of my search results...
In point of fact, there are sites that I would just rather not see from Google searches. An example of this would be news articles about politics from either NMR or Fox News. If I want propaganda, I can go to al-jazeera. In a similar vein, when I am searching for a product, I do not want to see twenty "we compare prices" sites -- if I wanted a price comparison site, I'd go to one.
I would like a way to customize my google "experience" so that I could specify sites that I simply do not want to see. Far be it from me to suggest that others not see these sites; I just want google to leave them out of results it produces for me.
As for pay news sites, I have paid subscriptions to a few news sites, and also subscriptions to some sites presented in Google Scholar. That does not mean that I want to subscribe - ever - to certain "news" sites that I find to be exceptionally biased.
If nothing else, perhaps I can convince google to add an option (plugin?) so that certain news sites links are rendered in yellow, instead of the default color. This would be helpful, at least to me.
Don't take life too seriously; it isn't permanent.
Limit the number of views? You mean like the FT does? That doesn't work.
Hobson's choice. None of the sites cut out the paywall sites on search. Either as a default or an option.
So where do you move to?
> MAKE PAYWALLED SITES AN OPTION in my preferences and set it OFF by default.
I agree. I don't want to see anything in my search results that I cannot see when I follow the link (abstracts with ads for paid access to the full article are fine).
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Not everyone is attached to an institution and not every paywalled publication is scholarly.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
(abstracts with ads for paid access to the full article are fine)
Not for all of us, and certainly not fine when even the abstract does not contain your search keywords (as the GP mentiones)
YES, please. My god I hate this aspect of Google, which is an incredibly annoying time-suck. It's even worse for me because I have a uni account that gives me access to most of the paywalled research, but only when I'm on campus, so when I'm off-campus and I want to know something I just desperately want the option to turn off all that paywalled crap.
Got an SSH account? Then you can download the papers by setting up an HTTP proxy.
OS Reviews: Free and Open Source Software
As sure as I'm sitting here, nothing will kill these annoying publishers deader than dead than google turning off access to news items on paywalled sites. NOBODY wants to pay for news and nobody wants advertising on their news sites. Get over it, already.
Good riddance, that Murdoch. What an asswipe he was.
The paywalled articles are often stuff that was available free before the paywall went up. Also, since they're behind a paywall, people assume that they're actually more authoritative ("they must be worth more if you have to pay for them"), but often, because they are now behind paywalls, they're subject to less critical review (and in many cases are just plain out-of-date or even wrong).
The paywall won't be around in a decade or so - after all, as a researcher, you want both "street cred" and tenure, and that means that the more your articles are cited, the better - articles behind a paywall won't get cited as much, so it will eventually be seen as a bad career move.
I wonder what happens when google sees that google bot is indexing google search results?
I get the New York Times, the Globe and Mail, and my local papers all through RSS feeds from the sites themselves. Google is totally unnecessary.
Do they not know about robots.txt?
This whole thing is confusing and convinces me the either I'm smarter than most folks who work at newspapers or quite a bit dumber. Have they been talking to the folks at RIAA or am I just retarded?
I don't think you know what that word means.
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/Tax 5 : to make onerous and rigorous demands on
Charging $40 to see an article that used to be free nd that is frequently outdated, obsolete, or inaccurate is really pushing the limits, as in "This paywall tax is taxing my patience."
It's also a "tax on stupidity", same as lotteries, not only because it encourages the use of outdated materials subjected to less review by outsiders, but also because it extracts a fee from those who do not know how to find the free version of many of the articles.
I wanted the same thing and found this firefox extension
http://www.customizegoogle.com/
It lets you enter filters (with wildcards) for the search results.
Now I want this filter list update automatically (like adblock), Oh well.
> In effect Google has given me a "hit" on my search then led me to a place where not even the search terms are present... Google crawler has access to it but I do not.
Google punished BMW.de for doing something similar to this before.
http://news.cnet.com/Google-blacklists-BMW.de/2100-1024_3-6035412.html
Quote: This is a violation of our Webmaster quality guidelines, specifically the principle of 'Don't deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users,'" Cutts' blog said.
Go figure.
We have already payed for the vast majority of the research articles indirectly through taxation.
What you haven't paid for is the publisher's bandwidth to provide those articles for download. The compromise, at least for biomedical research, is that NIH provides hosting for all federally funded research results at PubMed Central. It's a requirement of NIH grants that publications be deposited in PMC, where they are freely available within 12 months of publication.
I don't understand why Google searches seem more likely to bring up publisher websites than PMC, or even the PubMed abstract than the PMC full text. I imagine it's a PageRank phenomenon and the general obscurity of PMC.
No it is NOT an extra tax, it's a fee tacked on top of a tax.
Yes, adding items to the list id a huge bandwidth hit~
The point it, does Google return accurate results or not? If Google claims to be accurate, but intentionally returns inaccurate result, then they may be committing fraud.
Now of Google says they include returns for people who paid them to be there, then that's fine. We can all go use a different search engine.
ON a side note, I have found Google to be returning more and more hits that have none of the search words in there text. Google is also making wider assumption about what I am searching for, even things in quotes. It's starting to piss me off, actually.
If I search for "John Smith" in quotes, I don't want "Smith, John","Smath John" "Smith John" "John A. Smith". I want only pages that have the following characters in the following order: "John Smith"
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Google crawler has access to it but I do not.
And that right there should have given you your answer.
Think about what you've written for a minute... Google's crawler doesn't have actual accounts at every paysite on the web - Those sites have access rules to allow search engines (but not you) to retrieve for-pay content.
Can you now think of a way you might use that information to your benefit, rather than complaining that Google shows you more than you see in the abstract?
interesting, informative, insightful, yada blahda
the news can kiss my chuddies, if they start charging, i'll stop reading it again
simple
I think the real cost of publishing these articles is not the 'printing' of the article, (basically just pasting the pdf submitted to the web) but in peer-reviewing the articles.
That said, I do find it underhanded to charge for both the 'privilege' to have your article published and the 'privilege' to read an article, but since I assume that they make much of their money off charging group rates for universities to gain access, I doubt that is going to change.
So, if you get Google to do it, it encourages everyone else to follow along.
This shows how much influence Google has, not Murdoch. The only thing that doesn't make sense is why Google are caving to Murdoch.
I've been reading the WSJ for >30 years. It used to be the world's greatest newspaper, but since Murdoch took over it suffered a noticeable decline.
When they wrote a story, they used to interview people on all sides of the story, answer every obvious question, and wrap it up in a tight 1,500 or 2,000 words. Now they just interview a few people and wrap it up, even if the story has holes in it. They used to have editors who would review the stories and make sure they did everything right. Now they just let things slide.
Case in point: WSJ had a story a few days ago about how Wikipedia lost 50,000 editors, supposedly indicating a decline in Wikipedia. But: They didn't give the total number of editors. What good is a numerator without a denominator? (By one count, Wikipedia has 300,000 editors who edited >10 times.) But actually, Wikipedia has been modifying its pages with procedures like nofollow to discourage spammers. Does that 50,000 editors represent 50,000 editors who were discouraged and hassled by Wikipedia pettiness, as the story claimed? Or was it just 50,000 spammers who were successfully discouraged by new policies? The story doesn't find out. I pay $155 a year for my subscription and for that money, I expect to get a story that tells me. And I don't want to spend 5 minutes reading it and find out I've wasted my time.
Another story covered the closing of a prison in Michigan, because it finally hit them that the $40,000 a year it costs to keep a prisoner is coming out of their tax money. The WSJ did a lot of stories like that over the years, and they would always talk to one of the prisoners. This story didn't interview any of the prisoners. Is Michigan locking up people who are dangerous to society, or are they locking up shoplifters and drug dealers? The story didn't say.
Another bad development is that many of the columns in the WSJ are no longer written by journalists, but contracted out to business consultants, who are just promoting their own consultancies.
This is partially the result of layoffs http://www.businessinsider.com/2009/2/the-wall-street-journal-layoffs-memo-nws You can turn any great institution into a mediocre institution by cutting its budget sufficiently.
But I think the problem is the underlying philosophy. The WSJ used to be run by the Bancroft family, who loved great journalism more than they loved making money. Murdoch loves some things, but not great journalism.
Murdoch, listen to this: I'm willing to pay $155 a year for good information. That's what I pay for Science, the New Scientist, the New England Journal of Medicine, and others. I even paid $50 for the New York Times online. I'm not willing to pay $155 a year (which you just deducted from my credit card without my permission) for the same crap I can get anywhere else. You know how to win the race to the bottom, but you don't understand fair, balanced, quality American journalism, and you don't understand the Internet.
The free market is giving you a kick in the ass. Well deserved.
Fuck Google for stealing contents. Stop tracking me with your dataming shits.
It's not an answer, also not the point as has been covered in the thread above
What ticks me off is that you usually don't realize it is paywalled until after you have clicked through.
Haven't tested this very much, but I've noticed that at least in certain cases, the google "cache" link is missing on those articles behind a paywall
The newscorps are dinosaurs struggling to get out of the tar pits-- but the harder they struggle, the faster they get sucked down.
I don't read print newspapers at all and while I visit google news periodically, I rarely click through anyway-- the headlines are enough to tell me what I want to know for the most part. If they start blocking the click through, they'll lose the only chance they will have of subjecting my eyeballs to advertising. I do consume newsradio or newsvideo now and then, but most of it is so horribly biased I'd never pay to get it from one source...
I mean really?
WSJ is going to get more opinionated over the next couple years as the editorial staff shifts more and more into Murdocs back pocket. My local newspaper has better articles, that actually matter to me, not the Rush Limbaugh of the moment.
Which sites give google IP's free access??? Such sites should be freely accessible via google free translate service (request will come from the google IP) and/or google site aggregator (forgot the name but checked it out before as it used to cache one of my home pages every day).
Will other search engines have the same restrictions? Or is just google?
If they want paywalls to work, they have to make them painless. It's *not* the money stopping people (unless they're being outrageous, which is no doubt a factor for some of the sites)... I just don't see how they can be both secure and painless...
Seems unlikely that a lot of users end up on one news site via Google > 5 times daily. If it happens a lot, perhaps it will lead to users bookmarking those sites and visiting them regularly via bookmark instead of Google News. /speculation
The other side of the whole debate is whether the scholarly papers (at least those paid for by taxpayers in democracies like the US or UK) should be paywalled. I didn't mention it cos it wasn't relevant to the reply I was making, but in case you decide to raise it I think we need to press ahead with the open repositories for papers (and find a mechanism of peer-review linked to it). As someone who works in a UK university library, I think it is something that libraries need to push up the political agenda rather than meekly following the publishers lead (i'm not advocating libraries break copyright, but we should be at the forefront of the copyright debate and not leave it to the Pirate Bay et al.)
I am simply afraid that freedom to report means freedom to lie, cheat, or alter. Scientists are ALWAYS free to report, so those anecdotes on taxpayeraccess.org are a bit mis-represented. For example, "Nobel Prize Winning Scientists Say Federally Funded Research Should Be Available Free Online". That is fantastic, and they should be the first to lead the way. Write up your results and make a pdf and put it online. There is absolutely nothing in the research system that keeps this from being done. The thing is, scientists are both vain and distrusting. Getting into a journal such as Science or Nature is a goldmine for recognition, which many of the scientists I work with thrive on, I know I do. Secondly, without an independent review from an established journal, one can never be too sure about the quality and accuracy of the work. One should ALWAYS critically analyze a piece of work for themselves, of course, but journals act as a bar for confidence in the quality and accuracy of a work.
In short, the tax exists purely because the sciences want them to. Nothing systemically is holding the information free, and the very people who generate research and say it should be free are the very people who rarely take the step to make it so.
Solution:
1) go to translate.google.com
2) select English as the source and destination language
3) paste in URL. You are now seeing exactly what Google sees, with their user agent, from their IP range.
captcha: dodged :)
Fucking WebMasterWorld is good at that.
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
Awesome, now Murdoch can afford to hire journalists and fact checkers.
They see Google News (and Search) succeeding as a business model ... AND doing it with their (the newspaper's) content. They don't like it. But they do seem to have an idea that if they just don't let Google's crawlers access the content, then they won't get the traffic they have been getting from Google. The problem is, they just feel like they are not in control. They want everyone to get all their news from one site (theirs). They want to figure out how to get people to stay and not go back to Google News. But they can't figure out how to do that, so they want to force Google to do it for them.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
I can see why it annoys you when the main Google index does this, but I thought that was the point of Google Scholar. In hte Scholar preferences you can set your organization and Google Scholar will then route you through your institution's authentication and link resolver systems which will provide access to the content your institution has paid for.
It not the point of Google Scholar, unless your married to the idea that all research must be paywalled. I do not know the statistics, but it appears the paywalled sites are losing ground fast, with lots of quality new research being freely available. Perhaps the younger generation of researches "get it" when it comes to the internet and information distribution - a major reason to do research in the first place. Definition of Scholar: "a learned person". Fortunately for those of us who are learned, and more importantly, for those of us who want to learn, the paywalled gatekeepers to scholarly articles are quickly being replaced worldwide, much to their disgust.
option [c] had to be chosen. [...] This is distinctly different to the "Google should pay *us* for the privilege of listing our content", which is clearly insane.
The article appears to be about a publisher choosing option [c] and then offering to sell Google the right to distribute one-time tickets to view an article.
especially if you have n clicks free, which is probably going to be cookie based
One kind of cookie-based method is more difficult to work around: search results that display "Log in to your Google Account for premium results" at the top of the result page.
So report them as spam [and] Google will act.
When was this policy changed? I reported Springerlink, Elsevier, and Wiley to Google years ago, and Google hasn't acted yet. Do I have to complain while logged into a Gmail/Google Mail account so that Google knows it has a way to get back with me on a spam complaint?
it's all about $$$ in shareholder pockets now
There's a good reason to keep following "don't be evil" even after an initial public offering. Maintaining this philosophy increases the value of Google services to users and in turn to advertisers and in turn to shareholders. A company's brand has a value, which can be estimated as the assets of the company minus the liquidation value of its tangible assets, copyrights, and patents. This value even shows up momentarily on a balance sheet after an acquisition as goodwill. "Don't be evil" boosts this value.
It was a small publisher; I don't remember which one. They were telling me about how they were letting Google's bot in, but requiring others to subscribe, and I pointed out that people would just spoof the user-agent. They said they were checking the IP (I don't remember if that was in place of checking the user-agent, or in addition to it).