A bit of History

Last Month Rupert Murdoch, in an attempt to keep his subscription-based model for content working, threatened to use legal methods to prevent Google and other search engine “news aggregators” from taking his newspapers’ material. To add to this – large news publishers were reportedly being courted by Microsoft to de-list their news content from Google’s index.

An interesting aspect of this issue is of course the fact that Mr. Murdoch who started the attack against Google happens to be co-owner of Microsoft Bing.

So, this has caused some change with the way Google handles Subscription-based news articles. However Google claims this was actually in the works well before Murdoch’s crusade against Google.

Here are the changes

There are two changes that Google hopes will quell the discontent of media outlets. The first one is a change to its “First Click Free” program, which allows users to visit an article for free, but directs them to a sign-up page if they browse to another page. For example, if you visited a Wall Street Journal article from Google News, you’d get the full article for free, but would have to pay for other articles. The problem is that many people now abuse this feature to get all of their WSJ articles for free. The new change will limit you to five pages per day before you must register, regardless of how you get to the website. Media outlets can opt into this program if they so desire.

The second change is actually a change to how Google’s web crawlers index pages. Publishers now have the option to tell Google’s spiders to only crawl and index the “preview pages.” This refers to pages that display the first few paragraphs of an article on subscription sites like WSJ.com in order to entice them to pay for a subscription. If a publisher chooses to have spiders crawl their articles in this manner, they will be labeled with “subscription” within Google News.

This compromise seems to make a lot of sense. Publishers who are worried that Google is exploiting them, now in turn gain more control over what is displayed on Google and Google News. Google in return doesn’t lose publisher content.

We have to wait and see if these changes in the design will be enough to appease Murdoch and company. These changes seem pretty fair.