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Published Google Docs To Appear In Search Engines
dotancohen writes "Google plans to make all published documents from Google Docs users crawlable, if the documents are linked from a public Web site. No official announcement appears to have been made, just a short blog post on the subject by a Google employee in a help forum. (One comment on the ghacks.net post linked above says that email was sent to the admins of Google Apps accounts.) There does not seem to be any way to make an individual document not crawlable; you can only un-publish it, at which point Web links to it will not work any more." The move makes sense from one point of view — Google is just making crawlable a document linked from another crawlable document — but it's likely to catch a lot of people by surprise.
The summary or the article doesn't mention all aspects on it. For a better article, see theregister. "Google plans to make all published documents from Google Docs users crawlable, if the documents are linked from a public Web site." is wrong.
This only applies to files explicitly published using the suite's "publish as web page" or "publish/embed" options and linked to from a public webpage. This does not apply to files shared via the "Allow anyone with the link to view (no sign-in required)" option, which provides for document sharing without links to the public web.
So its not really as bad as it sounds. You have to explicitly publish them as webpage, which atleast for me tells that they might get indexed aswell, even more so if they are linked to from other websites.
The good thing Google could do here is to add explicit warning or small text under the publish option that the content you publish as webpage might be indexed by search engines aswell. Other than that I dont see a problem with this, as the users are explicitly publishing them.
At least for apps administrators, the following email was sent out with instructions on how to prevent this:
*****
Hello Google Apps admin,
We wanted to let you know about some important changes around published documents, spreadsheets, and presentations.
In a few weeks, documents, spreadsheets and presentations that have been explicitly published outside your organization and are linked to from a public website will be crawled and indexed, which means they can appear in search results you see on Google.com and other search engines. There is no change for documents published inside your organization or shared privately.
If you wish to prevent users from publishing documents to the public internet, we now offer an admin control in the Google Apps Control Panel that allows users to continue to 'share documents outside the domain' without allowing them to publish the files to the public Internet. To change this setting, follow these steps:
- Login to your admin control panel
- Select Service Settings > Docs
- Un-check the option 'Users can publish documents to the public internet'
If a user does not want their published Docs to be crawled, then the user must unpublish them by doing the following:
- Go to the 'Share tab'
- For documents and spreadsheets, choose 'Publish as web page'. For presentations choose 'Publish/embed'
- Click on the button that says 'Stop publishing'
For more details, please see this Help Center article: http://www.google.com/support/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=60781
This is a very exciting change as your published docs linked to from public websites will reach a much wider audience of people!
Sincerely,
The Google Apps Team
Email preferences: You have received this mandatory email service announcement to update you about important changes to your Google Enterprise product or account.
Google Inc.
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View, CA 94043
You mean things available on the internet might be indexed by Google? Holy Cow! I wonder if other search engines also do this "indexing" thing. Mysterious and curious activities for sure, I say.
Are you saying that I can't publish a document on the Web but limit who sees it?
That's an invasion of my privacy! Next thing you know you'll be saying I can't stop people watching me bang my wife in my front yard!
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
I'm actually surprised that, so far, no one has misinterpreted this as "all your Google Docs are belong to our search engine" along with a few jihaddist vows to delete all data from Google immediately. Instead, everyone seems to have read the article and understand that these documents already should have been indexed, because the users published them on a web site the public has access to.
Who are all of you people, and what have you done with my Slashdot????
"This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
I for one am filled with feigned outrage, because the way slashdot presents this article dictate I be!
Similes are like metaphors