[WEB4LIB] Google as Acrobat reader (!)

[Sloan, Bernie]

That feature's been there a while. I've made quite a bit of use of it.

Not all PDF documents make the transition gracefully, though. I've seen some
with pretty ugly formatting when viewing PDF documents as HTML via Google.

Bernie Sloan

-----Original Message-----
From: Richard Wiggins [mailto:rich at richardwiggins.com]
Sent: Thursday, November 15, 2001 1:35 PM
To: Multiple recipients of list
Subject: [WEB4LIB] Google as Acrobat reader (!)


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