Just yesterday, Rupert Murdoch threw another stone at Google. But before Murdoch had cocked back his hand to throw, Google had announced a solution that should make Murdoch happy, though it probably won’t.
There are two aspects of Google’s announcement that are important to both publishers and to searchers:
Google has expanded its First Click Free program to allow publishers to allow up to five clicks free per day for any user who accesses its protected pages from Google. More on that here.
Google will index preview pages, but list them in its index as “subscription” to warn users that all they will see is a preview of an article, but that they will need to subscribe in order to read the entire article.
Personally, I think Murdoch is just beating the war drums to draw out other disgruntled publishers so that he can persuade them (or coerce them) into joining him in a class action lawsuit against Google in an attempt to wrangle out some payment for Google indexing his content…
