Tuesday, April 6, 2010

How to access online Wall Street Journal for free

Access to Wall Street Journal online edition cost $1.99 per week. With few tweaks to your browser setting you can access every story in WSJ for free.

How does it works?

WSJ charges its user for online content, but it exposes all content to search engines for free. So that search engines can index it content and give better placement in its search result which eventually gives more readers to WSJ. To get this thing working you just need to trick wsj that you are Googlebot.

Follow following steps to enable WSJ access.
1. Install FireFox 3.x version.
2. Install Firefox pluginUser Agent Switcher from https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/59
3. Restart Firefox and choose select user agent as GoogleBot from Tools->Default User Agent->Search Robots

Thats All... you are all set to access WSJ for free.
Now when you visit wsj.com, website will treat you like google robot and allow you to access all the content for free.

If you are interested, you can learn more about User Agent. With manipulating User agent you explore different dimension of web and get iphone/mobile/ipad version of website on your desktop.