The web you see when you go through Google’s search engine is no longer the web you see when you don’t go through Google’s search engine.<\/p>\n
In a note on my previous post, The Centripetal Web<\/a>, Seth Finkelstein points<\/a> to Philipp Lenssen’s discussion<\/a> of a new Google service, called First Click Free, that the company formally unveiled on Friday. First Click Free allows publishers that restrict access to their sites (to paying or registered customers) to give privileged access to visitors who arrive via a Google search. In essence, if you click on a Google search result you’ll see the entire page of content (your first click is free) and you will only come up against the pay wall or registration screen if you try to look at a second page on the site. As Google explains<\/a>:<\/p>\n First Click Free is designed to protect your content while allowing you to include it Google’s search index. To implement First Click Free, you must allow all users who find your page through Google search to see the full text of the document that the user found in Google’s search results and that Google’s crawler found on the web without requiring them to register or subscribe to see that content. The user’s first click to your content is free and does not require logging in. You may, however, block the user with a login or payment or registration request when he tries to click away from that page to another section of your content site …<\/p>\n To include your restricted content in Google’s search index, our crawler needs to be able to access that content on your site. Keep in mind that Googlebot cannot access pages behind registration or login forms. You need to configure your website to serve the full text of each document when the request is identified as coming from Googlebot<\/b> via the user-agent and IP-address. [emphasis added]<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Now this is a helluva good business idea. (Google News has had a similar program in place for a while for newspaper sites, I believe.) It’s good news both for publishers (who get an easy way to provide teaser content to potential customers) and for surfers (who get access to stuff that used to be blocked). But, as Lenssen points out, it marks a fairly profound change in the role that Google’s search engine plays and, more generally, in the organization of the web:<\/p>\n There once was a time when Google search tried to be a neutral bystander, watching the web without getting too actively involved. There once was a time when Google instructed webmasters to serve their Googlebot the same thing served to a site\u2019s human users. Now, Google is officially telling webmasters they can serve one thing to people coming from Google web search, and another thing to people coming from elsewhere … Google\u2019s organic results thus become not any view onto the web, but a special one. You may prefer this view \u2013 when using Google you\u2019re being treated as a VIP, after all! \u2013 or dislike it. And it might force you to rely on Google even more than before if some publishers start creating one free website for Google users, and another free one for second-class web citizens.<\/p>\n Efforts splicing up the web into vendor specific zones aren\u2019t new, though the technologies and specific approaches involved vary greatly. In the 1990s, \u201cBest Viewed with Netscape\u201d or \u201cOptimized for Internet Explorer” style buttons sprung up, and browser makers were working hard to deliver their users a \u201cspecial\u201d web with proprietary tags and more. Many of us had strong dislikes for such initiatives because it felt too much like a lock-in: the web seems to fare better when it works on cross-vendor standards, not being optimized for this or that tool or \u2013 partly self-interested \u2013 corporation.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n At the very least, First Click Free provides another boost to the web’s centripetal force, as Google further strengthens the advantage that its dominance of search provides. Google doesn’t like to think of itself as locking in users to its search engine, but if you get a privileged view of the web when you go through Google, isn’t that, as Lenssen suggests, a subtle form of lock-in? Isn’t Google’s web just a little bit better than the traditional unmediated web?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The web you see when you go through Google’s search engine is no longer the web you see when you don’t go through Google’s search engine. In a note on my previous post, The Centripetal Web, Seth Finkelstein points to Philipp Lenssen’s discussion of a new Google service, called First Click Free, that the company […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1173","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1173","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1173"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1173\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1173"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1173"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1173"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
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