[necovek]

They are both behind a login for all practical purposes, right?

If you want to see search results on stuff only you have access to, that should be a special feature by Google: you let it log in using your credentials and crawl away.

I don't have access to it, so I'd rather get results that I care about. This is SEO at its worst, masking results I do want to artificially inflate their ranking.

Maybe I am not looking for a NYT article on it, but instead a wikipedia page. Or a university's history department coverage. Or an actual scientific study. Guess which one will rank higher today while having less objective information?

Now guess why that is? Artifical SEO for paywalled content.