Posted on 12/02/2009 10:36:47 PM PST by Red Steel
Mountain View, CA (AHN) - Google has unveiled a program that will allow news sites to limit the number of free clicks on news by online user per day to appease publishers complaining of Google News as profiting from their content.
The First Click Free program launched Tuesday allows an individual only five free clicks on news sites per day. Readers who click more than the allowed number of times will be greeted by a pop-up inviting them to subscribe to the news site.
The search engine giant is also applying to News Corp. another program that allows publishers to keep their content out of Google News while still making it available on Google Search. The program called news-crawler works by checking for robots.txt file on news sites to know if searching the site is permitted. The news site has the option to allow content on Google News instead of on Google Search.
The Google crawler previously was limited to allowing sites to block their content from being indexed and made accessible on Google Search.
I can write a robot to replace Google News with zero limitations on articles in about 15 minutes, and produce an RSS feed anyone can use. This plan is doomed to failure.
So, let me get this straight. ABC News and its ilk want to charge me to click on no news on climategate, no news on ACORN, no news on terrorist trials, no news on the failure that is obama, no news on muslim terrorist activity within this country, no news on birth certificates...
Something tells me they aren’t going to make a whole lot of money.
Oh and, I get my news from Free Republic.
My first thought, as well. There are lots of ways to dodge Internet turnstiles. And frankly, if they do succeed, they’ll be stuck with a declining user base. Pay-per-view is a loser model on the internet.
Clear your cookies and if you have dynamic IP, get a new address.
encryption and proxy servers work as well.
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