If you want to put content behind a wall of some kind, that is fine. You can't expect to have it be indexed in search. Having it show in search results while having a wall in front of it once someone clicks is a bait and switch. You can't have you cake and eat it too.
mynameisvlad|4 years ago
Why not? This is just as entitled a thought as the original quote from GP. Search engines aren't a public service. Neither is The Financial Times.
There's nothing that explicitly requires every single page that a search engine displays to be accessible by the user. There isn't even an internal policy within Google and other engines that would uphold that expectation. It might be a shitty user experience, but that's on the search engine and the resulting site to deal with.
Clearly, the FT has enough subscribers to be able to "lose" customers behind the paywall. And clearly Google isn't interested in cleaning up results to not include paywalls. So it seems they've both weighed the pros and cons and chose to continue with it. Who are we to tell them otherwsie?