Google Sheds Light On 'Dark Web' With PDF Search

CWmike writes "Google this week took another step in its effort to shed light on the so-called Dark Web, announcing that its search engine can now search scanned documents in a PDF. In April, Google announced that it was looking for ways for its search engine to index HTML forms such as drop-down boxes or select menus that otherwise couldn't be found or indexed." An announcement is available at the official Google blog, and it contains some demonstration searches.

Comments

Re:Just what we needed

[spitzak]

I think it is just going to look in the contents of the controls. This would be really useful, for instance if you search for "Widget Model XJ123" it will now find a page by a manufacturer where the only place they list it is in a pulldown list that lets you choose the product to buy.

Dark web? Deep Web!

[Anonymous Coward]

Referenced article is talking about the "deep web", not dark web.

There are "dark webs", but this isn't them.

[Jane Q. Public]

A "dark web" is a private network, accessible by members over the internet but not accessible to outsiders. (A VPN is one example of a kind of "dark web".)

But as you say, this is something completely different.

More to it

[spud.dups]

What I would really like to see is OCR for mathematical formulas, and store those in some standard format. Using a standard input, like LaTeX, the engine would search for mathematical equations. Right now I find it a pain to look for a formula that I know exists, but don't know its name.

This would help bring together a lot of research that is done, but hard to sort through. Then, implement a smart system using a program like Mathematica to find variations of the equations, etc., and see where duplicates exist. Maybe we'll find that we've discovered things that weren't looked at thoroughly enough.

Re:Cool, and definitely worthwhile, but...

[Firehed]

Why not just search for "teeth medicine" then? Google hasn't done direct keyword matching only in years now (for example, a search for "computer" may yield results containing synonyms such as "PC" or "Mac" even if the original keyword of "computer" isn't contained at all on the site).

Remember that Yahoo started out as a category browser in its very early days, and now categories are really just another keyword. Google and all of the other search engines are designed to work well for the lowest common denominator of internet users - as someone with a 3-digit UID, I imagine you're not in that group. Trying to outsmart Google will probably just make its algorithm feel unnatural/broken.