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July 2, 2005

First Click Free from Google

First Click Free

Rumor has it that Google's getting into the 'Deep Web' biz with a service intended to index subscription-only content and display it alongside the Google search results. Details are at BetaNews

One interesting wrinkle is called 'First Click Free'. Articles that sign up for First Click Free will appear in the normal Google search results. Users will be able to access the full content of a single article, but some method (presumably cookies or IP tracking) will prevent them from accessing any additional parts of the subscription site.

The problem is, of course, that anyone with any Google-hacking skills at all would easily be able to access all that content freely, and there'd be no value in a membership subscription.

I'm sure most subscription sites will see it this way. Forrester Research is selling reports for US$200 to $300 and up. I can't them being interested in First Click Free making that content freely available.

The executive summary or abstract is probably the way this is going to go, the way you see with many sites in Yahoo Subscription. That's the best way to maintain the exclusivity of the content while still giving people a taste.

There's a good thread on this over at SearchEngineWatch ,including details from Google provided by someone who's beta testing First Click Free (considering that beta testers are supposed to by under very strict confidentiality agreements, I wonder how Google feels about this).

Here's the overview from Google that's featured in the thread:

If you offer subscription-based access to your website content, or if users must register to access your content, then search engines cannot access some of your site's most relevant, valuable content.

Implementing Google's First Click Free (FCF) for your content allows you to include your premium content in Google's search index. First Click Free has two main goals:

1. Including highly relevant, premium content to Google's search index provides a better experience for Google users who may not have known that content existed.

2. Promoting sales of or subscriptions to premium content for Google partners.

To implement FCF, you need to allow all users who find your page using Google search to see the full text of the document that the user found in Google's search results, even if they have not registered or subscribed to see that content. Thus, the user's first click to your premium content area is free. However, you can block the user with a login or payment request when he tries to click away from that page to another section of your premium content site.

Thus, FCF is designed to protect your content while allowing for its inclusion in Google's search index

To include your premium content in Google's search index, our crawler needs to be able to access that content on your site. The Google crawler can navigate sites that use IP-based authentication. The Google crawler can not navigate sites that use password-based authentication. As such, you will need to allow our crawler to bypass any password-based authentication on your site.

You should configure your site to serve the full text of each document when the request is identified as coming from a Google crawler's IP address. As a part of the inclusion process for your site, we will provide the IP addresses for Google's crawlers. Please email premium-content-partners@google.com if you need this information and have not received it.

Note: It is equally important that your robots.txt file allows access by Googlebot.

Similarly, when users click a Google search result to access your content, your Web server will need to check the value of the HTTP REFERER field. When the referrer is a Google domain, like www.google.com or www.google.de, your site will need to display the full text version of the page instead of the protected version of the page that is shown to users referred from other domains.

Most Web servers, including Apache, have instructions for implementing this type of behavior.

See? Not all cloaking is bad after all.

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