[bobds]

Google sort of encourages this kind of cloaking. It's called First Click Free.

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en...

[mambodog]

Maybe Google doesn't want holes appearing in their searches when major sites go behind paywalls (newspapers?).

[barrkel]

Of course, I had forgotten...

[lwat]

Google should reconsider their position on this I think.

[nostrademons]

If Google reconsidered their position on this, a vast archive of subscription-only NYTimes, Financial Times, WSJ, etc. content would suddenly become inaccessible.

I can't count the number of times I've seen an interesting article on Reddit or HN, clicked through, found myself butting up against a paywall, and then just Googled the title and been able to read the whole thing for free. You think that these companies would suddenly put their whole archives online for free if they didn't get a bunch of search traffic for it?

[cscheid]

I wish google would put ACM and IEEE's feet to the fire. Their crawler definitely sees full PDFs, and we don't.

[lwat]

Acceptable loss in my opinion.