A Little Less Spam

Why do online newspapers want you to register, since they charge you nothing for it? Often, because they can make money renting out your email address to others. In common parlance: spam.

For this reason, I keep my registrations to a minimum. But often,others will reference articles on such sites, and I would like to see them.

Here's my workaround:

1. Copy the url into your clipboard.
2. Now paste it into Google and search for it.
3. Google will probably find nothing, but will recognize that your search term was a url and will note this by saying:

   If the URL is valid, try visiting that web page by clicking on the following link: <here it will repeat your original url>

4. Click on the link. It will take you to the url, but - since you're coming from a Google page - you can often get in.

This technique works on a number of major online news sites, such as the NY Times and the Washington Post.

I presume this is so because these sites wish to be searchable on Google, which means that their articles must also be reachable from Google. And it sure beats risking even more spam in your in-box.