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Google Scraps Controversial Policy That Gave Free Access To Paywalled Articles Through Search (theverge.com)
For years, Google has provided a nifty trick to get around subscriptions for newspapers and magazines. But the company is now doing away with it. From a report: Google is ending its controversial First Click Free (FCF) policy that publishers loathed because it required them to allow Google search results access to news articles hidden behind a paywall. The company is replacing the decade-old FCF with Flexible Sampling, which allows publishers instead to decide how many (if any) articles they want to allow potential subscribers to access. Google says it's also working on a suite of new tools to help publishers reach new audiences and grow revenue. Via FCF, users could access an article for free but would be prompted to log-in or subscribe if they clicked anywhere else on the page. Publishers were required to allow three free articles per day which Google indexed so that they appeared in searches for a particular topic or keyword. Opting out of the FCF feature was detrimental because it demoted a publisher's ranking on Google Search and Google News.
Hopefully, Google will also recognize paywalled sites and refuse to index them, or at least put them at the bottom of the results.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Give me as a user the optional to hide sites with paywalls.
I too have a decades-old policy: I don't use pay-walled sites.
Protect your browser with the Force Safe Search add-on
Over the last couple of years it became pretty regular that I'd hit a paywall coming from gnews anyway. I just assumed this policy was long cancelled.
Of course, with the remake of gnews to be mostly whitespace instead of articles, its useless and is probably dying on the vine.
FWIW, if anyone misses the original functional gnews layout, this saint has reconstructed it:
https://theoldgnews.com/
Sexxy! ;-P
I have found that if you enforce javascript blocking using NoScript, some sites that only want you to be able to view a certain 'count' of articles for free just can't keep track and don't block you.
If paywalls become functionally absolute for 90% of their potential audience, shouldn't those sites be considered completely advertising and blocked (at least optionally) by most ad-blockers?
That way, I don't have to be distracted by them in search results.
Also, this hopefully has the fortunate side effect of much fewer bogus links to paywalled articles by slashdot editors.
Paywalls are like DRM - they're content locked off in a way that will mean that information will likely be destroyed and missing to future history - a blight motivated by desire to control for the sake of resource gathering. Not a bad motivation - but a very bad effect, and a misguided expression of that motivation.
It's all a side effect of our priorities as a society - we have enormous resources together, but allow ourselves to hate the idea of sharing that information in any consistent way - we villainize all our news outlets, all our institutions, and then hope it all runs on pocket change. I'd much rather we get something closer to the BBC, more than the circus-for-money we currently have in American media. All sources of news are flawed - but you can get much closer to truth with dedicated institutions separate from our current tabloid market/political engine.
I DONT WANT content in search results that I can't actually view.
Fine, get rid of FCF if you want, but then either blacklist subscription sites from search indexes, OR require indexed content match what I can see and
give me a checkbox to omit them from search results (preferably checked by default).
Just delete your cookies and you're good to go.
I have no problem with traditional business models.
If you want advertising to pay your site costs and allow visitors in for free, great.
If you want to require a paid subscription to access your site, great.
However, you don't get to have your cake and eat it too.
If your visitors decide to use ad-block when visiting your site paid by advertising, tough shit.
If your paid subscription site can't get crawled and listed in a search engine, tough shit.
Pick your business model, live with it, and stop whining.
As with many others here, I don't want results from sites that I can't visit. I understand that Google wants the data, but there's no reason that I need to see that mixed in. Google currently has a feature for Chrome users that not many people seem to be aware of called the Personal Blocklist. You can get the extension from Google here:
https://chrome.google.com/webs...
After you've installed it, when you're on a google search results page, you'll see a small link to "block example.com" under each result. No more articles from Forbes or pictures from pinterest that you can't browse through. Hope that helps someone!
<?php while ($self != "asleep") { $sheep_count++; } ?>
I realize that stubbornly refusing to RTFA is a decades long tradition here, but at least in the very old days blatantly ignorant posts like this would not get modded up to +5.
The very definition of FCF is that subscription sites were (practically) blacklisted from Google's search indexes unless created a subscription exception for Google users.
While I don't like that Google has agreed to make search results less useful, I do appreciate that they were between a rock and a hard place. The subscription sites gathered enough data to reasonably demonstrate that Google's blacklisting policies drive down subscription rates, so if Google kept blacklisting them Google risked being sued (especially in the EU) for abusing its monopoly status to interfere with their business.
I will only be truly disappointed if Google does not clearly flag them in search results so that people can pre-emptively choose not to click on those sites.
I have good news and bad news.
But they do need to come of with some way to notate pay walled articles
Good news: Google Search on desktop browsers fairly reliably notates paywalled articles through the lack of "Cached" in the down arrow menu.
Bad news: The down arrow menu doesn't appear in mobile browsers.
and while they're at it flag the sites that pester you to turn off your ad block to view an article.
Bad news: Now that Google has established its pay-per-article system known as Contributor, Google has actually joined the anti-adblock brigade. It even recommends that users of Firefox Private Browsing click a button labeled "Disable protection" to allow access to a site. (This is because most anti-adblock can't tell the difference between tracking blockers, which block only ad networks and exchanges that track users across sites, and actual ad blockers, which additionally block self-hosted ads.) Now that TV Tropes is using anti-adblock, I'm even more glad that I switched to All The Tropes years ago.
PBS and NPR exist. They're not government agencies, though they are funded by a mix of contributions from government programs and viewers like you (thank you).
I will only be truly disappointed if Google does not clearly flag them in search results
Paywalled documents use <meta name="robots" content="noarchive">. Google Search flags results with noarchive on desktop (look for lack of "Cached") but not on mobile.
Publishers were required to allow three free articles per day which Google indexed so that they appeared in searches for a particular topic or keyword. Opting out of the FCF feature was detrimental because it demoted a publisher's ranking on Google Search and Google News.
Wait wait hold on a sec. I thought Google played innocent on rankings by claiming it was all algorithms.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Among sites that appear in Google Search results displayed to me, I have perceived the noarchive value as noticeably correlated with conditional access methods, such as paywall or anti-adblock. If there were no desire for conditional access, a rational site operator would allow archiving even if only to shift the hosting burden for old documents to archive operators. For an example of such shifting, see here:
Your experience appears to differ from mine. Which sites using noarchive that lack conditional access do you commonly see in results from Google Search?
As usual, many of the comments reflect the idea that us peons are Google's customers. We want Google to cater to OUR needs, instead of Google's real customers...those who pay Google real money to show up in search results. It is funny to hear people who never want to pay a cent for anything expect their needs to be considered by (and be a top priority for) various businesses who are in it for the money.
I'm not able to come up with a list for you at the moment, but I do see it often. I do it on my own sites as well: I use "noarchive" to prevent the caching of pages that change frequently (typically, this is the front page), and allow caching on pages that don't. This is the pattern I usually see with non-paywalled sites.
There are no subscriptions I'm willing to pay for, other than water, gas, electricity, garbage and Internet. If I'm not willing to subscribe to newspapers, cable TV, streaming TV/movies, magazines, etc. I'm definitely not going to consider subscribing to your online site. I really hope google makes it possible for you to be hidden from me.
Google Scholar already has this feature, which is a mixed blessing. The text you are searching for shows up in the snippet but may be paywalled from view on the indexed website. It definitely helps you do serious research for free and sift through the results to find the most accurate pages, but sometimes you're expected to pay $30 just to see the actual text in context. Thank heavens for Sci-Hub.
Oh goody.. Now I will NOT be tempted to follow more bad news.... This will greatly aid my withdrawal from the internet as it has become.
Google says that paywalled news sites won't get downranked. It may be true in the sense that there won't be an explicit penalty.
However, a common reaction after hitting a paywall is to go back to the search page and find something else. Normally, in that situation, googles downranks the offending site, considering that it didn't match the user's needs.
Search for/create a snapshot of the paywalled article on archive.is. The snapshot will usually have the full article.
...but when I hit a paywall, I always close the window. There are so many other ways to get information today, it's not worth me trying to figure out if the content is worth buying if I can't even get to hit. That goes double for that stupid Forbes loading screen as well.
LinkedIn, whose user profiles get amply indexed by Google Search.
Given the recent article "LinkedIn Says It's Illegal To Scrape Its Website Without Permission", LinkedIn probably has some sort of quota on profile views by the general public, like a metered paywall.
I use "noarchive" to prevent the caching of pages that change frequently
That is absolutely not what noarchive is for -- there are are other directives to control caching.
Noarchive is for asserting that projects and tools such as archive.org shall not save and make available historic versions of
a web page allowing users who explicitly want to see old versions to see them.
The page creator has that right legally to say nobody should redistribute archived versions of their page, which
is what that tag is for --- but as far as I'm concerned anyone setting Noarchive is being Evil / anti-internet by
making their site part of the disease that is information that can be lost -- in most cases trying to squeeze their idea of maximum Profit, which is
not what the world wide web is for, and not the kind of content I want my Google searches to bring me to, unless there's no other option.
How is google supposed to know that a page is browser-UA-sniffing and blocking anything that isn't google bot? Personally I'd love to see if google abandoned their custom UA in favor of faking a regular browser so this kind of BS stops.