nline newspaper sites like the Financial Times require users to sign-in if they

want to read more than one article on their site. The New York Times too had such a
restriction in place earlier but they seem to have dropped that requirement now.

The Wall Street Journal, on the other hand, is a subscription-based site. They do
offer free access to some of news stories but all the premium content is behind a
pay-wall and therefore available only to paid subscribers.

Since these newspaper websites are part of the �First Click Free� program, someone
visiting them via Google search can read the first page of the story without
registering or subscribing. The first click is therefore �free� but the user will
have to sign-in or register to read further.

First Click Free & Google Visitors

However, due 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.