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:
"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
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 think a model some internet-only news sources are going to follow is that used by Josh Marshall's Talking Points Memo. He has taken a blog, and built a political news network out of it with TPM, TPMDC, TPMuckraker and a couple other sites. It's been successful enough for them.
I would also keep an eye on how Salon evolves. They've been at the forefront as well, but not always among the winners. Time will tell...
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!
The Wall Street Journal is doing fine with a paywall, so it may take some convincing.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
There is a large effort needed to write quality stories...a lot of calling people, driving around interviewing, checking documents etc.pp
Many people, myself included, won't favor paying for what is passing as news because the stuff above doesn't happen. If there are journalists and writers actually doing in-depth analysis, writing thought provoking stories, with relevant and accurate facts, people will pay for it. Right now, I see more of this is being done in magazines, not newspapers.
Was it the word corporate that gave it away? ;)
'If Christ had tweeted the sermon on the mount, it might have lasted until nightfall.' - John Perry Barlow
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.
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!
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.
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.
Newspapers were once the only source of information
Then came Radio and TV, and they because the source of in depth well researched information
Then came the Internet, they could have a role as a known reliable source of information
The problem is that the only role they have left is to be a reliable source of in depth news - and my experience is that they are not reliable, cover most stories in a very superficial way, do poor research (mostly from the internet, or direct from press statements) and are not very well written ....
If they were a bit more processional then people would be willing to pay for their content, as it is people will just go elsewhere...
Puteulanus fenestra mortis
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
Woops, lost the links:
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. /quote
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.
1) get Firefox
2) get User Agent Switcher extension
3) Set you user agent to googlebot's UA
4) See what google sees
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.
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.
I wish there were a way to exclude pay-walled pages from the search results. What do you think about it, Google?
> 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.
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).