Google as Acrobat reader (!)

[Richard Wiggins]

I just discovered something.  Google now offers a "View as HTML" link for hit list entries corresponding to PDF files.  To see examples, just go to Google, search for "PDF", and scroll for a hit list item that includes the "View as HTML" link.

Does anyone know if this is new behavior?  I know they've been indexing PDFs for some months now, but I don't recall this option.  

I suppose this just falls out of the fact that they translate the PDF to HTML and feed that to their parser and indexer, and that they also cache those intermediate files, but I think it's really cool.

/rich

(PS -- there must be a library technology angle there somewhere.  Suppose your patrons use Web TV to read PDF files that your library hosts.  There.  :-) )

Richard Wiggins
Writing, Speaking, and Consulting on Internet Topics
rich at richardwiggins.com       www.richardwiggins.com