Premium contents published on the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) Online edition are usually only available to paid subscribers. Non-subscribers will only get a short preview of the article.

Despite blocking non-subscribers from accessing their content, WSJ gives free access to Google as they rely on Google to bring in search traffic. I believe WSJ wants Google to index the entire page, as opposed to a few teaser words.

So if you can fool WSJ’s servers into thinking that Google is the HTTP referrer, you will be able to read the full article for free!

Following are the steps involved to access free premium content from WSJ.

1. Install the RefControl Extension for Firefox. Restart Firefox after installing the extension
2. From Firefox Tools menu, click on RefControl Options and click on ‘Add Site‘. Specify online.wsj.com for ‘Site‘ and Custom: https://news.google.com/news/ for ‘Action‘
3. Browse to a WSJ article that requests for a subscription
4. Take a look at the WSJ article URL, it will be something like:

   http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122164835444047599.html

   Now, modify the URL in Firefox by appending the string ?mod=googlenews_wsj to the end of the URL. The new URL should look like:

   http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122164835444047599.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

5. Hit the reload button in Firefox and enjoy the article.