How is Google giving me access to this page?

December 27, 2006 2:29 PM

How come if I search for this page and click on the Google link I get to the page, but if I copy the link that Google gives me and try to access it directly, I'm taken to a login page?

What I really want is to be able to e-mail this link to people, or include it in a fpp on the blue.

posted by alms to computers & internet (10 comments total)

check out the top right when you click on the google link. It says, "logged in as a google guest". They must allow direct links from google searches in for some reason.

As for giving a link why not just give them a link to the chached version.
posted by jourman2 at 2:33 PM on December 27, 2006

Well, it's a low-level, badly-designed subscription site, apparently.

You want a stable link? Use this. It's just the Google cache, which can be obtained through the "cache' link next to the Google entry.
posted by koeselitz at 2:33 PM on December 27, 2006

Ahem...I meant check out the top left.
posted by jourman2 at 2:33 PM on December 27, 2006

crap! beaten by seconds...
posted by koeselitz at 2:34 PM on December 27, 2006

Google have an open URL redirector, so you can craft a link that uses that:

Link via redirector
posted by simonw at 2:38 PM on December 27, 2006 [2 favorites]

I've seen this practice too (example) trying to research stuff for Wikipedia articles and it pisses me off.

Does Google allow this, and if they don't, do they bother doing anything about it? Lately I've seen some high-profile publishing companies farming out their products in this manner. I get the impression Google allows it since they mysteriously don't provide caches for them. I wonder if Google is getting kickbacks for this indexing.
posted by rolypolyman at 2:41 PM on December 27, 2006

simonw: "Google have an open URL redirector, so you can craft a link that uses that..."

Cool! How did you do that?
posted by koeselitz at 2:51 PM on December 27, 2006

Why wouldn't Google allow it? If anything, it just cements their place as THE search engine to use and drives more traffic to their results and ads.
posted by SuperNova at 3:02 PM on December 27, 2006

Does Google allow this ... ?

Actually, it is the other way around. A large number of scholarly journals restrict their content only to paying subscribers. Google is allowed to crawl their restricted content, largely in support of scholar.google.com (but the results often come up in the main search). This allows you to search for terms and find documents that otherwise would not be indexed in one place (some are indexed on the publishers' own sites). Good for you. It also sends you directly to the publisher's website where you can usually read the abstract, and decide if you want purchase a subscription or fulltext of the article. Good for them. [Note that if you are at an institution that subscribes to the journal in question, you can often access the material through the institution's network]. It is no different from the way that Google News is able to show you articles from subscription news sites.

The current state of academic publishing is that not everything is available for free. There's plenty of debate about this, and I'm neither going to condemn nor defend it here, but like it or not, it is how things are right now.
posted by alopez at 3:28 PM on December 27, 2006

It's explicitly against the google webmaster guidelines to give the googlebot one thing and regular viewers another. It's deception, and it leads to poor search experience, and if someone at google finds a site doing it, they will remove the entire site from the google index.
posted by Rhomboid at 5:23 PM on December 27, 2006