Use Google to read the Wall Street Journal for free

Rupert Murdoch’s statement yesterday that he wants to block Google and other search engines from indexing News Corp. sites. — such as the Wall Street Journal, which hides some of its articles behind a $1.99-a-week paywall — makes now a good time to remind people that you can use Google to read those guarded Wall Street Journal stories for free.

If you click an article headline while browsing WSJ.com, you may get the first few paragraphs and a note asking you to subscribe (this is what Murdoch calls a paywall “not right to the ceiling”).

But if you come to an article via Google, you can read the whole thing for free.

So if you find an article you like, just search for the headline in Google and, for good measure, add “site:wsj.com” to restrict it to the Wall Street Journal site.

Click the headline in the search result and — hey! no paywall.

You can make the process even easier by bookmarking this link – It’s a Google News page filtered to show stories from the Wall Street Journal.

Oh, and this isn’t new. It’s been an open secret since at least March 2008.