Jun 13, 2009
A trick to get access to protected sites.
Sometimes, when you search in google for something, you find very nice results but when you visit those sites, they seem to be protected i.e; you need to either sign-up or maybe you need to pay for it. So, here’s a way to get access to it without paying or even signing up.
Mostly people want their exclusive content to be protected. Since it is exclusive, they would want people to know about it so that more people join the site. That is why they let search engines to access their protected content so that it gets listed in their results and site gets traffic for that. Now search engines are similar to people. Websites only have one way to differentiate between them – User agents. All the search engines have user agents which makes them differentiate from humans.
As we all know, Google is the greatest and largest search engine (hope Bing will capture the market too).
Its user-agent is “Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)”.
With this information, we can get access to protected sites which is freely available only to search engines.
We need Mozilla Firefox for the purpose. Download it from here if you don’t have it.
Now, get this user agent switcher addon for firefox:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/59
Now, download this file:
http://www.techmindz.com/useragents.xml
Now, import the user-agent strings into the add-on by:
In Mozilla Firefox:
Tools -> User Agent Switcher -> Options -> Options -> User agents -> Import
Select the file you just downloaded.
When accessing the protected site, goto Tools -> User agent switcher -> Googlebot 2.1 (New Version)
You will get access to its contents.
Any queries will be answered here.
Regards
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Hi, gr8 post thanks for posting. Information is useful!
the download link is “This XML file does not appear to have any style information associated with it. The document tree is shown below”
Not working
done it but still cant get access to the forum
Well, which forum you need to have access to?
Also, this works really great for IPB forums ie. forums running on Invision Power Board.
Interesting. There have been times I required this. I knew there was something, but didn’t know exactly what.
Thanks.
Yep, you also can search for that URL on google and click on cache in the result to get access to the site’s page.
I tried but could not get access to download keeper.com
I switched my agent to google bot as you said, but still i see the login page.
@mni
Well, you can’t get access to all the sites using this method because not all sites use same methods for protection.
You can try http://www.bugmenot.com to get a username/password for the site. It may or may not work.