Sneaking in the Back Door

Congoo NetPass is a free service launched this spring that offers limited access to subscription-only articles with just a few clicks of your mouse. It works with 35 sites offering paid content from more than 300 sources, including Morningstar, the New Republic, Billboard.com and the Philadelphia Inquirer. (Several sites offer content from multiple sources. Libraryo.com, for example, archives more than 200 city newspapers and newswires.) Depending on the site, you can make between four and 15 free visits to paid-content per month.

Over time, that can add up to substantial savings. An annual membership to Encyclopaedia Britannica, for example, would regularly cost you $69.95 ($84.95 if you also wanted access to Merriam-Webster Unabridged). But by using the Congoo toolbar, you can access five articles a month.

Here's how it works:

Download the toolbar
The toolbar works with both Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox. When you sign up, you'll be asked for basic personal information (name, age, zip code, etc.), so that your subscription information can be used to automatically log onto the sites you'd like to access. Downloading the software doesn't mean your Internet activities are being tracked. The only information the software logs is the number of articles you've accessed relative to your monthly limit.

Conduct a search
You'll see both premium results — i.e., those from subscription-only sites — and regular ones, courtesy of Yahoo Search. Click to access paid content, and your subscription information is filled in automatically. (Prefer Google or another search engine? No problem — a small pop-up box on the toolbar will alert you if there is subscription content that matches your search.) Another pop-up box will alert you when you're one page view away from your monthly limit for a particular site.