I’m pinch hitting this week for the normal “designated blogger,” a useful metaphor given that the World Series is upon us. (Hats off to the Tampa Bay Rays, who defeated the hometown team in Boston, though not before enduring the biggest playoff comeback in 79 years.)

This week’s buzzword is “First Click Free.” I was tempted to go with mail goggles — but that’s so early October.

First Click Free (FCF) is a new service for webmasters and online publishers that Google launched last Friday on Google’s Webmaster Central blog. It’s a bit difficult to keep up with the number of betas rolling out of Mountain View these days — but stay with me.

This one’s important.

With First Click Free, Google has launched a pre-emptive strike on search competition from MSN, Ask, Cuil, Yahoo! or anyone else that wants to wear the search giant’s crown.

If you start your search at google.com, you now gain a privileged view into digitally published content. Surfers, who now get instant access to pages where they were once blocked, are likely to love First Click Free. Publishers can now choose to offer teaser content or rich abstracts that pull visitors further into a site, gaining membership and generating leads.

As Nick Carr notes, however, “The web you see when you go through Google’s search engine is no longer the web you see when you don’t go through Google’s search engine.”

There’s now an even stronger incentive for every Web search to begin and end with Google. This is clearly great business. The question now is whether it’s good for the Web.

Philipp Lenssen spent some time addressing that question in his analysis of what’s good and bad about FCF at Google Blogoscoped. In a comment on to Nick Carr’s post on the cost of FCF, Google’s Matt Cutts wrote that “FCF is a pretty well-balanced way that publishers can surface content that would normally require a subscription or payment, without the risks of cloaking.”

FCF may be a great fit for digital publishers embracing a freemium model; for the rest, the costs and benefits are still emerging.

Note: As visitors to any of TechTarget’s network of more than 60 websites knows, many white papers, webcasts and tips require registration. Should our publishers choose to opt in to FCF, you’ll likely being seeing more of them.