4 ms·

I'm surprised it took them this long. I like many others used it to view paid articles for free. I imagine paywalled sites didn't like that and told them to shu

I'm surprised it took them this long. I like many others used it to view paid articles for free. I imagine paywalled sites didn't like that and told them to shut it down.

seanw444 2y ago
I didn't even realize this existed. Now it's too late to enjoy it.
- sionisrecur 2y ago
  You can still set your user-agent to Googlebot.
  - ventegus 2y ago
    They check for client IP. True Googlebot always comes from 66.249.*.*
    - seanw444 2y ago
      Yeah I was like "surely it can't be that easy." So I went to try, and no, surely it is not.
      - iggldiggl 2y ago
        Sometimes you can get lucky though – I know at least one forum that requires registration even just for viewing posts, but lets Googlebot through and only checks the user agent.
8organicbits 2y ago
Wasn't that NOARCHIVE? https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/679/how-do-i-prevent-google-from-serving-a-cached-version-of-my-site https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/679/how-do-i-...
- fngjdflmdflg 2y ago
  I'm not so familiar with this area but my guess is that if you turned used noarchive, Google would not cache the page at all and therefore would not be able to use the text in your page as keywords for search results. So most sites therefore did not use noarchive because it improved discoverability/SEO to allow Google to cache your site. This is just a guess though and what I always assumed to be the case. This seems to be the case though because the cached versions would often contain the entire article for free, which makes no sense unless they were doing it for SEO. For example you could use this trick to read any nikkei article.
  - 8organicbits 2y ago
    Nah, it's not a Google thing although Google honored it. Here's a reference to the Internet Archive using it: https://archive.org/post/31561/robots-archive-noarchive-meta-tags https://archive.org/post/31561/robots-archive-noarchive-meta...
    - fngjdflmdflg 2y ago
      I didn't mean to say that noarchive is only a google thing. My only point was that my assumption is that until now if Google didn't cache your site its contents would not be used for SEO.
UncleSlacky 2y ago
https://archive.is https://archive.is often works for paywalled sites.

I'm surprised it took them this long. I like many others used it to view paid articles for free. I imagine paywalled sites didn't like that and told them to shut it down.

seanw444 2y ago

I didn't even realize this existed. Now it's too late to enjoy it.

sionisrecur 2y ago
You can still set your user-agent to Googlebot.
- ventegus 2y ago
  They check for client IP. True Googlebot always comes from 66.249.*.*
  - seanw444 2y ago
    Yeah I was like "surely it can't be that easy." So I went to try, and no, surely it is not.
    - iggldiggl 2y ago
      Sometimes you can get lucky though – I know at least one forum that requires registration even just for viewing posts, but lets Googlebot through and only checks the user agent.

8organicbits 2y ago

Wasn't that NOARCHIVE? https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/679/how-do-i-prevent-google-from-serving-a-cached-version-of-my-site https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/679/how-do-i-...

fngjdflmdflg 2y ago
I'm not so familiar with this area but my guess is that if you turned used noarchive, Google would not cache the page at all and therefore would not be able to use the text in your page as keywords for search results. So most sites therefore did not use noarchive because it improved discoverability/SEO to allow Google to cache your site. This is just a guess though and what I always assumed to be the case. This seems to be the case though because the cached versions would often contain the entire article for free, which makes no sense unless they were doing it for SEO. For example you could use this trick to read any nikkei article.
- 8organicbits 2y ago
  Nah, it's not a Google thing although Google honored it. Here's a reference to the Internet Archive using it: https://archive.org/post/31561/robots-archive-noarchive-meta-tags https://archive.org/post/31561/robots-archive-noarchive-meta...
  - fngjdflmdflg 2y ago
    I didn't mean to say that noarchive is only a google thing. My only point was that my assumption is that until now if Google didn't cache your site its contents would not be used for SEO.

UncleSlacky 2y ago

https://archive.is https://archive.is often works for paywalled sites.