s the journalism industry gathers once again to wring its hands about the future, Google has thrown it a bone with new limitations on its "First Click Free" policy for news stories shown on Google News.
Companies that operate subscription-based Web sites--such as The Wall Street Journal--don't want to expose the full text of their articles to Google. But despite what WSJ owner Rupert Murdoch says, most of them also want their articles and sites discoverable through Google and Google News. As a compromise, Google has allowed those publishers to participate in what it calls a "First Click Free" program, where articles accessed through Google News links can be seen in their entirety, but if the user attempts to click anywhere else on that story page, they are directed to a sign-up page.
The problem is that Web users quickly figured out that you can access almost any Wall Street Journal article for free simply by cutting and pasting the headline into Google News, which generates a "free" link that isn't available if a publisher such as CNET links to a Wall Street Journal article. "While we're happy to see that a number of publishers are already using First Click Free, we've found that some who might try it are worried about people abusing the spirit of First Click Free to access almost all of their content," wrote John Mueller, Webmaster trends analyst for Google, in a blog post.
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