Comment by wolvoleo
17 hours ago
Most paywalls just allow search engines to read their content just fine. Because they do want discoverability, they want their cake and eat it.
There's a few publications that don't even do that though and archive.is is very good at bypassing them so I do imagine they use logins for those, but for the masses of sites it's not currently necessary.
You can't impersonate Google. Sites check the source IP and they don't overlap with Google Cloud.
Google isn't the only search engine in the world of course. It probably is pretty much the only one that matters in America but the world is not just America either.
You can for sites that can't afford the cost of keeping up-to-date with the Google IP list without which they can lose timely indexing. That is many.
What do you mean by “afford the cost”? The list is free of charge (https://support.google.com/a/answer/10026322?hl=en-GB) and maintenance can be fully automated.
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Then why hasn't anyone built a client-side browser addon that impersonates a suitable search engine?
They have. It's called bypass-paywalls-clean . It works pretty ok.
It just keeps getting banned from the addon catalogs because of complaints from media. The Firefox one was taken down by a french newspaper. So you have to sideload it, which is hard to do on Android.
Edit: it looks like even the github was taken down now: https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-firefox
But yes it exists. And it works for most sites. It's just hard to get it now.