The GoogleGazer noticed two days ago that Google searches no longer returned results from the Online Wall Street Journal, even when queries were crafted to elicit hits from WSJ specifically.
News Corp., owner of the Wall Street Journal had long threatened to do exactly that if Google refused to pay them for their content.
Apparently they have, more or less.
The Wall Street Journal has a “public” section while the bulk of the site is restricted to paying subscribers. Once the dust settled, the public portion remained indexed in Google, while the “subscriber only” portion seems to be blocked, forcing paying subscribers to use the far more primitive Search function on the online.wsj.com site.
Paying subscribers can test this by doing a search at online.wsj.com and then repeating the same query in Google, prefixing it with Site:online.wsj.com, which restricts the query only to the Wall Street Journal.
Similarly, Financial Times offer only limited free access. Google searches restricted by Site:ft.com may or may not return Financial Times’ content. FT.com has a more robust search engine.By it’s a pity that you can (apparently) no longer do all your searching in one place, even if you pay subscription fees to both.
Although no one seems to be talking, it seems like each of these august sources of reliable data wants to get paid for allowing the little snippets that Google searches return, and so far, Google hasn’t agreed.
The GoogleGazer hopes this gets fixed. Information wants to be free, as Stewart Brand said at the first Hackers‘ Conference in 1984.
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