Thursday, December 22, 2005

Hack Wine Spectator with Google Part II

It's back! I know Wine Spectator will get wind of it soon and fix it, but for now, access to Wine Spectators paid content is available. Click here Now Click Here The power of Google's cache strikes again! This time instead of using Google News, we use Google's Cache through search. Here's how it works.
  1. Go to Wine Spectator's site.
  2. Click on Articles and Features > Headlines and scroll down to a headline a few days old.
  3. Copy and paste that headline into Google with quotes. (e.g. "A Week in the Rhone: Part 3")
  4. Click on the Cached link in the top search result
  5. Read!
Here's a few recent stories: Note: Looks like there is a two day lag before the stories are viewable on Google's Cache. Disclaimer: Again, I am not showing you any illegal hacking here. The problem lies with Wine Spectator and Google, and I am just pointing it out. Hopefully they'll get it fixed soon.

3 Comments:

Anonymous wineguy said...

Very interesting. Thank you for this.

12/22/2005 05:11:00 PM  
Anonymous Murray said...

This is interesting, why would the google spider gain access to password protected pages? Unless the developer specifically allowed it...

12/23/2005 01:25:00 PM  
Blogger Jathan said...

That's a good point, and I believe therein lies Wine Spectator's problem. Probably in an effort to increase search term relativity for their site they allow access to these pages.

Step 1: Allow indexing of every story
Step 2: Drive traffic thru to the site via popular wine search terms
Step 3: Block access to the story, except for a teaser at the top
Step 4: Profit from new subscribers dying for the information!!

My guess is they just don't know there is a loophole.

12/23/2005 02:42:00 PM  

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