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."

Comments

Frist Psot!

[darthflo]

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:

• Google the Article's URI, click the link and off you go (with a real Google referer).
• 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).
• 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).
• As a last resort, there's quite a few ad-blocking personal proxies out there. Most of them allow you to fake Referers or change User-Agents, for any browser.

Re:Frist Psot!

[kars]

Well, that's the other side of the coin; if I'm willing to pay for my news, will I finally be rid of all the ads? I think not.

Meaningless concession

[damburger]

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.

What is going one here?

[Matrix14]

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?

Re:What is going one here?

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

It's something Google requires any websites to do to be linked at all. If you present different information to Googlebot than to normal users and Google finds out about it, you get kicked out of the Google index. So you have to choose between:

[a] Letting users see the story for free

[b] Showing Google the same login screen as everyone else

[c] Being kicked out of the Google index entirely

It sounds like Murdoch and co have threatened to take path [b], and Google have made concessions.

Re:Who needs an alternative

[Evtim]

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!

What really pisses me right off about paywalled...

[Smegly]

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!

Re:What really pisses me right off about paywalled

[radtea]

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).