Google Also Planning Subscription Content Search

Posted on July 5, 2005

Beta News reports that Google is also planning a search tool that will search premium content similar to Yahoo's Search Subscriptions, which was recently launched. Beta News says that Google's new search tool is currently being test with a small number of subscription websites:

Yahoo announced its own Yahoo! Search Subscription this month in an effort to surface normally restricted content. "This enables consumer to access their personal subscription content in one place via Yahoo! Search," a Yahoo spokesperson told BetaNews.
In contrast to Yahoo, Google has kept its efforts shrouded in secrecy. "We are under a strict confidentiality agreement. We've been told several times by Google that we are not allowed to share this information with anyone outside the involved organizations," a source close to testing told BetaNews.
Sources said that Google's Premium service creates a full sitemap of the paid site and then clears the Google IP block and Spider agent to show protected content. Publishers will be made aware that there was a Google referral.

There have been some complaints that Yahoo's Subscription Search does not display enough content from the articles and that this limits the effectiveness of the search tool. However, publishers may be reluctant to give much of the content away for fear of losing subscribers. Subscription or premium content is also known as the Deep Web, since it cannot be accessed by standard search engines.

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