[WEB4LIB] Google as Acrobat reader (!)

[Felicia Little]

I believe this has been going on for quite some time.  I've used that
feature several time. And yes, this is a superb feature.

Cheers,
Felicia

-----Original Message-----
From: web4lib at webjunction.org
[mailto:web4lib at webjunction.org]On Behalf Of Richard Wiggins
Sent: Thursday, November 15, 2001 1:34 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