View Premium Membership Sites Like Experts-Exchange For Free

There are two memories that are brought to mind when thinking about the site www.experts-exchange.com. One comes in the form of a chain letter passed around a few years ago and the other of frustrated computer users hoping to solve their issues only to find a page with garbled text and a link to sign up to view the solutions.

Lucky for you there is a way to bypass the restriction.

Before I tell you how to install the required files to make this work, I will explain what will make all of this possible. Google has its own "robot" that browses the Internet and automatically adds any websites it finds to its index of pages. The reason that Experts Exchange pages appear in your searches is that they give full access for Google to read the solutions posted by users of their site. This means that if we can disguise ourselves as Google we will be able to read everything on their site for free. Ready? Let's get started:

(If you already are a user of Firefox you may skip to the second section.)

Download and install Firefox using the default settings. Once Firefox is installed, open it and navigate to http://chrispederick.com/work/user-agent-switcher/ to download the extension we will be using, User Agent Switcher.

A bar should appear below the address bar. Click the button, and then the button. Now click the download button as you did before, but this time click the button to install the extension. Restart Firefox and continue on to the next step.

Right click this file, choose "Save As", and save it to your desktop:
Googlebot User Agent

We will now enter the information that allows us to "trick" websites into thinking we are Google. Follow the image below to open the User Agent Switcher options:

Once it is open, click the User Agents tab in the menu on the left.

Click "Import" and select the file "useragentswitcher.xml" you downloaded before, or follow the instructions below to add it manually.

Click on the "add" button and fill in the following information:

Description: Googlebot

User Agent: Googlebot/2.1 (http://www.googlebot.com/bot.html)

Double check that you have entered the information exactly as it appears above and click the "OK" button when ready.

Finally, switch your User Agent by clicking "Tools", "User Agent Switcher", and selecting "Googlebot".

The last setting we must change prevents ExpertsExchange from placing cookies. These cookies are what makes the useragent trick stop working. To do this, click Tools, Options, and then the Privacy tab. Select "Exceptions" from the Cookies section and block both www.experts-exchange.com and experts-exchange.com. When finished, your exceptions window should look like this:

You are now able to view the solutions on Experts Exchange.

This should hold true for many membership sites. Feel free to post a comment with other sites you have found this to work with. Thanks.

Note: If the above technique does not work for you, follow these steps to view a solution:

1. Open the page with the solution you want to see.
2. View the source of the page. (Right click, view page source.)
3. Translate the text using one of many ROT13 decoders: http://www.google.com/search?q=decode+rot13