Your Google Docs will soon appear in public search results

Docs linked to crawlable pages are set to be crawled themselves next week.

Google quietly announced last week that it would soon be crawling and including Google Docs in its public search results. All published documents that are linked to from a crawled Web site (or are published with the embeddable option selected) will appear in the search results of Google and other search engines. The change is set to take place next week.

Google announced this news, not in one of its heavily watched blogs, but as a quickie post to the Google Docs support forum. Here is the gist of the announcment:

"[Posted September 17] In about two weeks we will be launching a change for published docs. The change will allow published docs that are linked to from a public website to be crawled and indexed, which means they can appear in search results you see on Google.com and other search engines.

Please note that this only applies to docs which you explicitly publish using the 'Publish as web page' or 'Publish/embed' option, and which are linked to from a publicly crawled webpage. This doesn't apply if it's only set to 'Allow anyone with the link to view (no sign-in required)'.

If you don't want your published docs to be crawled, then you can un-publish 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'

If you're a Google Apps user, and you find you're unable to publish to the world, it could be that the admin of your domain has disallowed publishing outside the domain. Please check with the admin of your domain."

This change in Google Docs requires a change in mindset for PC users. We've been trained by a quarter century of PC use to think of our spreadsheets and word processing documents as private unless explicitly made public, not the other way around. Users that link their own documents to their own Web sites obviously want to share those documents. But if you send the URL of your document to a friend and that friend links your document to a crawled Web site such as a blog post, your document could now show up in front of all sorts of people, not just readers of your friend's blog.

Google Docs users need to develop a broader awareness that by using the free, cloud service offered by Google, they are giving up an assumption of privacy.

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• Google
• data privacy
• Google Docs
• online data privacy
• privacy
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