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Comment by kencausey | Hacker News Reader

There is another choice which is to click the 'web' link under the title above which does a Google search for the title. Nearly always at the top of the Google search the article will appear and through that route you will get the entire article from many paywalled news sites, including WSJ.

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WSJ closed this[1]; web link here finds the article in google which still hits the paywall.

[1]http://digiday.com/publishers/wall-street-journal-paywall-go...

This is fixed in Google Chrome by opening up the console in Web Enspector, and enabling Network conditions from the three dot menu and then in that new tab select Googlebot as the custom user agent. Note that you will still have to click on a google search link.

I wouldn't exactly call that a "fix", but still, thanks for the tip.

Once you've set it up once and figured it out it's easy to just to toggle it the next time. It's definitely more work. I prefer this to installing a random extension that can read all my data on all websites.

works for me in an incognito window

Interesting that this practice doesn't seem to affect the WSJ's rank in Google search results. Cloaking content based on user-agent is definitely a violation of Google's webmaster guidelines (https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66355?hl=en)

I remember they had some rule for google news that allowed paywalls if a user can read at least N articles per month from google search results. This is probably the same case.

https://support.google.com/news/publisher/answer/40543?hl=en...

This doesn't work anymore, give it a try and see.

Just worked for me

Also there is a choice not to visit sites that do not want you to read them.

Rather they want you to pay for a subscription to read their articles than not read them. Not everyone can afford $200 a year for a subscription to the WSJ. They are still using a newspaper business model that is based on subscribers rather than an Internet website business model of free with advertising.

Some sites refuse to serve content if an adblocker is installed.

So there is a lot of subscription models with some websites that try to force people to pay for articles. It is not that they don't want you to read, they want you to pay to read.

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