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Wait, Google Sent Me

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Re: Wait, Google Sent Me

#241

Post by maratd »

eli wrote: post #194
bdcravens wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This tool saves the 3 seconds it takes to highlight the article title, 'Search Google for ...', and click the link in the search results.

I don't follow. Would using the plugin be less acceptable if the paywall were harder to get around?

> Would using the plugin be less acceptable if the paywall were harder to get around?

I don't see the plugin as getting around their paywall. I see it as getting around moronic web development.

For example, if a site has unbelievably intrusive advertising and I install an ad blocker. Or a site pops up a register for our newsletter modal and it's blocking the content and there's no way to close it ... so I open up the console and remove the dom node entirely so I can see the article.

In other words, stupid shit that 99.9% of people don't know how to get around, but a web developer can get around in a few seconds.

That's not hacking or bypassing anything, that's just moronic web development.

If you want to put up a paywall, that's fine. A wall is a wall. If you make a hole in the wall on purpose and people walk through that hole, don't blame the people ... blame the wall.

Re: Wait, Google Sent Me

#243

Post by hire_charts »

manigandham wrote: post #149
hire_charts wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I support subscription content. But you can't have your cake and eat it too -- in other words, you can't put content behind a paywall and also have it publicly indexed by search engines. Remove the trick where it's okay for Google searches to circumvent the paywall and this extension becomes useless.

Why not? So paywall content is not good enough? It's just a different business model by publishers: free access with ads or pay for access. Why does that penalize the content itself and the discovery of it?

What's happening here is that it's not just "free access with ads or pay for access." It's "free access if you came from google, so that google can index our pages, but otherwise pay for access so that we can put the same content behind a paywall." It's less a business model and more an SEO trick that Google puts up with under certain conditions.

Re: Wait, Google Sent Me

#244

Post by asquabventured »

yoasif_ wrote: post #100
threedaymonk wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can achieve the same thing with the RefControl add-on, which allows you to set a custom referrer for a particular site: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/refcontrol

Fantastic tip. For anyone interested in trying this out, use http://news.google.com as the "custom" referer. Screenshots and help here: http://www.renjusblog.com/2010/01/hack-read-wall-street-onli...

Perfect! Thank you!

Re: Wait, Google Sent Me

#245

Post by asquabventured »

pornel wrote: post #237
udev wrote: post #21

Good idea, but does not work with Financial Times.

Hi! I work for Financial Times. We've started experimenting with First Click Free — soon you'll get one article a day for free if you come from Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or Reddit. We'd like to let Google index more of our content (which will require allowing First Click Free from Google as well), but that depends on our other efforts, such as launch of a redesigned desktop site (you should try the beta, it's prett…

Can you add Drudgereport to that list? I follow a lot of links from drudge and when he links to a FT article and I click without realizing I end up at the paywall splash screen and just immediately close the tab.
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