I’m sure most of us have had the problem – search for something with Google, see a search result appear that is exactly what you’re looking for, only to find that when you click through to the page you get told that you must log in to see the content or (gasp!) pay to see it in full. Well, there is a simple way around this: pretend to be Google!
Sites like these detect when Google is crawling their site and show the full content, but don’t give regular people the same luxury. Sites generally detect this by looking at the user agent, which is a string that identifies what kind of browser/device is requesting the page. Therefore, if we change our user agent string to match that of the Googlebot (the system Google uses to find content on the web), we can see the content that was indexed to make the search result we found.
There are various ways to change the user agent that your browser is reporting, including the great User Agent Switcher extension for Firefox, or the IE7Pro plugin for Internet Explorer 7.
Whichever way you go about it, you want to change your user agent string to:
Googlebot/1.0 (googlebot@googlebot.com http://googlebot.com/)
You may have to restart your browser for the change to take effect, but after that you should be able to go back to the site you were trying to access and see exactly what Google does – the content!