Ever stumble onto a pay wall at the likes of the Wall Street Journal but aren't ready to subscribe just to read one article? Tech blog Digital Inspiration highlights a classic Google hack for breaking through the pay wall for free.


Google launched a new First Click Free program at the beginning of last month that aimed to address these sort of workarounds for pay-walled content when readers were coming from Google News, but as Amit from Digital Inspiration notes, they still don't seem to have done anything to change the behavior from the search box.

[D]ue to a possible bug in the implementation, the registration prompt gets bypassed for Google visitors giving them free access to all the news articles — even the premium content meant for subscribers. It works like this. You first copy the web address of any news article that is behind the registration firewall and paste that URL into the Google Search box. Now click the first Google result and you'll be able to read the full text of the corresponding story without registering or subscribing.


As I said, using Google to bypass the pay wall isn't exactly a new trick, but it's a handy one we've never highlighted before. Use it wisely, and, of course, if you're using it a lot, it's probably worth your time to go ahead and subscribe to skip the hassle altogether.

A Simple Google Hack Gives You Free Access to Online Newspaper Articles [Digital Inspiration]