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Protip: many paywalls, including this one can be circumvented by using Google's URL redirection service: http://www.google.com/url?q=http://online.wsj.com/article/SB...

Simply use 'www.google.com/url?q=' and paste in the address of the article which has a paywall.



That's awesome, thanks .. how does it work? I mean why does it allow google to bypass their paywall.


Because google does not like to index pay-walled articles. They are either not indexed at all, or given a low score. This makes complete sense because Google wants their users to be happy and users are usually not very happy when they hit a pay-wall.

Online publications, on the other hand, really want their paywalled articles to be indexed by Google. You may remember Murdoch did a lot of complaining about this a couple of years ago. So now publications do a little trick where they make the whole article available to people coming from Google but offer a paywall to anyone else. This means that you can usually access the entire article if you are redirected from google.


Interesting, thanks. It seems counter-intuitive that they would allow all users from google to see the full article, since that's where you'd imagine a lot of traffic would come from.


So that google doesn't knock them down in ratings or outright delist them.


cool, just turned it into a bookmarklet http://paywall-killer.blogspot.com/




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