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Tuesday, March 25, 2008

Get WSJ articles for Free

The other day, I was shown of a technique to get WSJ articles for nothing. Apparently WSJ releases some articles to allow Google to present them in the News section.

There are several issues with this technique:
  1. There are some links on www.wsj.com that are only accessible to subscribers and if you can't activate those pages, you cannot see the titles of those articles nor can you bring up portion of those pages. For example, the link for 'US Business' is only accessible to subscriber.
  2. The technique seems to be back to front under utilizing the power of Google's search engine.
Surely, there is a better way and indeed there is and below is a better way:
  1. Open your browser and go to www.google.com
  2. Then click on the 'News' link.
  3. On the News' page, click on 'Advanced News Search'
  4. On the Advanced News search option page, on the edit box for 'Return only articles from the news source named', type 'Wall Street Journal'
  5. Then press the Google Search button and you'll be presented with a list of WSJ free articles.
This is using the power of Google Search! If you are having trouble following those instructions, just click here for the list of articles.

As a paying subscriber to WSJ I can compare the completeness of the articles returned by Google and what are available to subscriber only. I can tell you that what's released for free is a small area and that paid subscription entitles access to many facility and data.

Still the availability of some articles which are free makes it easier to share information with others without violating copy right or subscription conditions.

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