A cute hack...
Ever research something with Google, go visit the site and discover that it requires some lame-ass registration to view? But Google could see it just fine -- it had to in order to index it.
Be like Google -- from the wonderful
MainframeGlitch website:
Secret Backdoor To Many Websites
Ever experienced this? You ask Google to look something up; the engine returns with a number of finds, but if you try to open the ones with the most promising content, you are confronted with a registration page instead, and the stuff you were looking for will not be revealed to you unless you agree to a credit card transaction first....
The lesson you should have learned here is: Obviously Google can go where you can't.
Can we solve this problem? Yes, we can. We merely have to convince the site we want to enter, that WE ARE GOOGLE.
In fact, many sites that force users to register or even pay in order to search and use their content, leave a backdoor open for the Googlebot, because a prominent presence in Google searches is known to generate sales leads, site hits and exposure.
Examples of such sites are Windows Magazine, .Net Magazine, Nature, and many, many newspapers around the globe.
How then, can you disguise yourself as a Googlebot? Quite simple: by changing your browser's User Agent. Copy the following code segment and paste it into a fresh notepad file. Save it as Useragent.reg and merge it into your registry.
Very slick. If you are using IE, you need to merge two registry files everytime you switch back and forth but it's pretty simple. Other browsers have this ability built-in Opera does it seamlessly, Mozilla/FireFox has a plug-in.
Posted by DaveH at December 7, 2006 10:01 PM