This is a disappointing decision. As a user, I don't want Google to rank page content for me based on something other than what I'll see when I visit the page.

This is a disappointing decision. As a user, I don't want Google to rank page content for me based on something other than what I'll see when I visit the page. With this system, presumably, Google sees one thing (the actual article) while I will see something else (a useless paywall): bait and switch. When I search the World Wide Web, I'm not trying to find content within private walled gardens. It's fine if Google wants to add support for ranking paywall-restricted pages, but those results should only show up for people who have a subscription at the website, and not for everyone else who doesn't. This would be easy to implement: the publisher sets a cookie with Google on each user who has access. Only users with a cookie will see restricted articles in their search results by default. You could further improve the search experience by allowing users to set a preference determining whether they want to see restricted content in their search results for which they don't have a subscription. To be fair, the previous policy requiring three free articles per day was probably excessively deleterious for subscription websites. That's probably more than 95% of casual users will ever read. I think there's a better middle ground in here somewhere. Most of the time, I want to filter websites out of my search results if I don't have the ability to read the article right now.