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by vehemenz 1391 days ago
Publishers are subverting users' reasonable expectations that the information they search and receive hits for on Google is publicly accessible—why else would it appear in search?

It's actually everyone's business because this creates a web that is less usable for everyone. If publishers were willing to commit and make their paid content server-side for customers only, they would have a stronger case against infringers.

2 comments

That's just your definition of "reasonable".

They provide users with an expectation of what information they will receive if they pay for the content.

The fact that this "glimpse" of the content pollutes your web searches is a search engine problem.

It would be trivial to filter sites with paywalled content. But Google refuses to let you do that. Hope someone else will come along and help with that.

It's the search engines definition of reasonable. Don't like it? Don't let the search engine get to the content.
Since when are Google results 100% clearnet? This has never been the case, ever. Search "login" in Google and you'll get a lot of content that is not publicly accessible.
They are serving different content to Google than users, and are then upset the version they served Google is available to users.
What? Those login pages are publicly accessible in their entirety.