Published Google Docs To Appear In Search Engines 62
dotancohen writes "Google plans to make all published documents from Google Docs users crawlable, if the documents are linked from a public Web site. No official announcement appears to have been made, just a short blog post on the subject by a Google employee in a help forum. (One comment on the ghacks.net post linked above says that email was sent to the admins of Google Apps accounts.) There does not seem to be any way to make an individual document not crawlable; you can only un-publish it, at which point Web links to it will not work any more." The move makes sense from one point of view — Google is just making crawlable a document linked from another crawlable document — but it's likely to catch a lot of people by surprise.
Re:Summary is wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm actually shocked they weren't already.
I mean, that's what google does, it indexes things/
Why would I expect my google doc I link to would be treated any differently than say, a PDF doc I link to?
I really just took it for granted that is was searchable,
Re:Summary is wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
It would seem to me, if you are publishing it as a webpage purposely and linking to it from a public website, one would think you would like it to be crawled.
I got the email from google since I admin two google apps domains, and have no problem with it. We don't normally publish docs like this, but if I did it would be because I wanted them found.
I am sure a lot of people on here are going to go overboard like they always do because it is google, but it is not going to expose all of your private docs.
I'm aghast! (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm actually surprised that, so far, no one has misinterpreted this as "all your Google Docs are belong to our search engine" along with a few jihaddist vows to delete all data from Google immediately. Instead, everyone seems to have read the article and understand that these documents already should have been indexed, because the users published them on a web site the public has access to.
Who are all of you people, and what have you done with my Slashdot????
Re:Summary is wrong (Score:1, Insightful)