Google Docs now to be in Google Search Results!

Yes, thats for real. Now Docs and Spreadsheets from Google Docs that are publicly published will now be crawlable by the search engine. For this, the document should be published publicly and be a part of a public webpage that is already indexed by the webpage.
Here's Marie from Google who on Thursday wrote in a blog post that "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 Web site to be crawled and indexed, which means they can appear in search results you see on Google.com and other search engines...This is a very exciting change as your published docs linked to from public websites will reach a much wider audience of people."

She added that the crawling for search results "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 Web page" (documents for which users choose only to "allow anyone with the link to view" will not get crawled. Also, the users can choose to un-publish the documents that they don't wish to be indexed.

Some users of the search giant's suite of online productivity applications expressed concerns about the plan, suggesting better labeling of potentially crawlable documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. For example, how would you know definitively if a publicly crawled Web page has linked to your published document? Is the only way to ensure that your published document does not ultimately show up in search results to actually unpublish it


As noted by The Register, "Google Apps master view does not tell you which docs are publicly published and which aren't." While it may well be obvious to most users how publicly available their Google documents are--and many of those published documents may well be intended to be as publicly available as possible--this seems to be another area where Google needs to find the right balance between transparency and data accessibility.


Respond in the comments about what you think about this move from Google.


Source: CNET News - "Webware"