Google Makes Unsearchable Docs Searchable

Google is planning to make scanned documents searchable. The search engine giant says it will use optical character recognition software to make it possible to search any Web-hosted document stored in Adobe Systems PDF file format. Google will convert scanned documents into equivalent text files that can be searched, indexed and returned as responses to Google search queries, said Evin Levey, a Google product manager. "This is a small but important step forward in our mission of making all the world's information accessible and useful," Levey said. The company's application of OCR technology to the Web is also expected to aid Google Book Search, their controversial book-scanning project. Google has been scanning the book collections at the world's major libraries at a rate of 3,000 book titles per day. The current-generation search engines can only locate multimedia material that has been tagged in text, a cumbersome, time-consuming process that content producers often overlook. This explains why a number of researchers are hot in pursuit of the Holy Grail of search -- the means whereby search engine providers can directly scan multimedia content and match results to search queries and the ad placement requests of their customers. In July, Adobe Systems revealed that it has optimized its Adobe Flash Player technology to enable search engines to index multimedia content produced in the Flash file format -- content that previously had been undiscoverable.

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