Have you ever experienced searching the web, clicking a desired result and end up in a page that prompts you to login? It's like your being stopped to pay a toll saying 'Give us money first or else go away'. It's quite annoying right?

Good thing Google unveils a new web search service called First Click Free (FCF). This will allow users to see the full page content of a subscription-only page after clicking Google's search result (thus your first click is free). Actually, this service has long been implemented in Google News and now being ported in web search.

FCF can benefit web user as well as publishers and content managers. As Google explains:

First Click Free has two main goals:

- To include highly relevant content in Google's search index. This provides a better experience for Google users who may not have known that content existed.

- To provide a promotion and discovery opportunity for publishers with restricted content.

First Click Free is designed to protect your content while allowing you to include it Google's search index. To implement First Click Free, you must allow all users who find your page through Google search to see the full text of the document that the user found in Google's search results and that Google's crawler found on the web without requiring them to register or subscribe to see that content. The user's first click to your content is free and does not require logging in. You may, however, block the user with a login or payment or registration request when he tries to click away from that page to another section of your content site

I've searched more on FCF and found a relatively good commentary by Philipp Lenssen. He discussed the potential things that this new service could cause. Its good to pay his blog a visit.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 23, 2008 at 7:25 AM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.