How to Read Premium News for Free Online

If you are a finance news buff like I am, you probably enjoy the Wall Street Journal.  If you have ever spent time looking at articles on WSJ.com, however, you might have hit the subscriber wall more than once.  This trick works on most news websites, but not all.  The format of the URL may also be different on other websites.

I learned a sweet trick about getting through the subscription wall, and thought you might enjoy it.  Just follow the steps below to see the entire article for free.

1. Copy the article URL (web address) from the address bar in your browser and paste it into a Google search.  Click on search.
2. When the search results appear, look for the question mark after .html in the address you pasted into the Google search.  Delete everything after .html including the question mark.  Press search again.
3. Click on the result for the article you want to read from the Google results.  That should take you to the full, unabridged article.

Why does this work?  In order for Google to give the website search results, news sites allow the Google bots to crawl the entire contents of the article.  If you click through within the website, you are given the truncated version with a subscription advertisement.  If you come in from the search engine, which is given full results, you can read the entire article for free.

Enjoy!