Those of you who keep up to date with the search world will no doubt have been aware of the ongoing dispute between media mogul extraordinaire Rupert Murdoch and the major search engines that index the news content published on his websites. Most recently we reported that Murdoch was considering creating a deal with Microsoft that would allow news from his empire to be circulated exclusively on Bing and delisted everywhere else; including the most popular search engine: Google.
Yesterday Google announced that they were to succumb to the threats from Murdoch and limit the news that its users would be able to access through the search engine. By joining the new First Click Free program content providers are now able to select the number of pages a visitor is allowed to access through Google before they are simply presented with a registration or subscription page.
For searchers this means that, after the number of free visits in a day has been exhausted, Google will present links to its users that, when clicked on, will lead to registration pages which is undoubtedly likely to frustrate searchers. This solution will undoubtedly appease the news providers who have thus far failed to find a way to effectively monetise their online content. But is this the right way to go about it? It remains to be seen whether clicking on a desired headline and waiting for a page to load only to be presented with a registration screen will encourage searchers to register and make a payment or simply result in them becoming irritated with both the news provider and the search engine presenting registration pages as if they were news.
How do you feel about this? Do you want Google to present links to registration pages as if they are news articles? Personally I understand the dilemma that the media industries are facing with the scope for free content that the Internet provides; however I feel this is a misstep from both Google and News Corp. If Google is going to limit the number of news articles from a selected source that I can view then I would prefer them to remove the news site from results completely after the free views have been used up. While this would mean fewer results would be displayed the frustration of repeatedly clicking on my search results and being presented with registration pages rather than the news would be removed.
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