Google halts free reading on pay news sites
By siliconindia   |   Thursday, 03 December 2009, 14:58 IST   |    3 Comments
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Google halts free reading on pay news sites
Bangalore: Google has decided to not offer news content for free. The company is closing a loophole that allowed some motivated newshounds to read large numbers of articles on subscription-based sites without paying for them. In a change that Google announced in a blog post on Tuesday, the company will allow publishers to limit non-subscribers to five free articles a day. "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," the company said in a separate post, according to the New York Times. The company's "First Click Free" program, which publishers of pay sites can choose to participate in, is designed to allow readers to get a taste of a site's content. For example, someone who finds a Wall Street Journal article through Google News can read it free, but if the reader tries to reach other articles from that page, he or she is asked to buy a subscription. Some news publishers, particularly Rupert Murdoch of the News Corporation, have recently accused Google of stealing content from them, and News Corporation has reportedly talked to Microsoft about removing links to its content from Google and having them appear only in Microsoft's search engine, Bing. Google says it helps publishers by bringing them new readers. It notes that there are fairly simple technical measures that publishers can use to specify which of their pages should appear in Google, or to remove their sites entirely. The new changes to the Google program are a small concession to publishers, but they seem unlikely to change the terms of the debate.

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