Google Makes PDF Files Searchable

Google, using optical character-recognition technology, can now scan PDF files, turn them back into text and make them available as search results via the “View as HTML” link.

"In the past, scanned documents were rarely included in search results as we couldn't be sure of their content," said Google product manager Evin Levey in a blog post. "We had occasional clues from references to the document -- so you might get a search result with a title but no snippet highlighting your query. Today, that changes."

the OCR thing might be new, but I have gotten PDF ->View at HTML links for many years with google search.

That's not what they are talking about, Steve should have worded it better.

Google is referring to SCANNED documents that have been saved as a image within a PDF file. It isn't a standard text created PDF.

Isn't this really against the entire meaing of PDF files?

This is potentially HUGE for research. With the amount of material that already exists online as .pdf image files, people will be able to do survery and cross reference in ways impossible before.

thank christ, i bloody well hate pdf's and searching through them in awful

pdf is made out of people!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

so long as they don't dick around with password protected pdf's, its all good.