Wired has an article about the fact that the nation's "newspaper of record" can't achieve that same status on the web, due to the fact that its archive is restricted to paying customers. I do hate that, though I can sympathize some with publishers trying to make money.
Anyway, it seems like there is a good technological solution. The search engines should distinguish between free content, paid content, registration-required-but-still-free content, and perhaps content with other impediments. Then, you could set your personal search parameters accordingly. The default could be the way it is today, oriented toward free content, but you could change it if you wanted to.
Of course, that only addresses a part of the problem. A big part of Google's ranking algorithm involves analyzing how many pages are linking to a given source. And if that source is hard/impossible to link to, it won't get so many "votes".
11:27:01 PM 
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