In light of the move by News Corporation's Rupert Murdoch to make news a commodity online -- making readers pay to access accurate and timely news reports on the web -- Google also made an adjustment by offering a new feature called First Click Free.

As the name implies, Google allows web and news publishers to set up a facility to show content preview free but subsequent access to pages may need login access. This application tries to help achieve these two goals:

a) Include highly relevant content into Google's search index

b) Provide opportunities for publishers to promote pages with restricted content

In other words, First Click Free offers you, the content owner, to promote your pages on search engine results without disclosing protected content. Such protected content may be the body of a news article, a blog post or an image gallery. Traditionally, if we don't want such content to be accessible, we tell robots.txt to exclude page from search crawls. But this also effectively hides our pages from search engine results. Thus, Google's First Click comes into the picture to resolve this apparent dilemma.

To implement this feature, a website owner or webmaster must allow Googlebot, Google's search engine robot to crawl pages covered by the feature. The server should be able to distinguish Googlebot using User Agent or IP address. Also, ensure that robots.txt does not block search engine access to the page. Web servers must display the whole page accessed from search results, adhering to the "First Click Free" mission of displaying a page without restriction.

By being able to tell the referrer page as one that belongs to Google or its country specific domain, web servers can display login prompts on further pages accessed by that visitor referred from Google News. I think this feature even helps news websites gather subscribers instead of stealing content because if handled properly, the feature provides a good preview of the page before a visitor decides to pay for future access or it's not worth doing so.

I would be interested to see how this program progresses. Will Rupert Murdoch be happy or will Google abandon this later? Only time will tell.

Photo credit: birdfarm