Google Apps sics crawlers on public docs and sheets
Beware what you publish — Google will soon allow search engines to crawl and index documents, spreadsheets, and presentations published to the web via its online office suite, Google Apps. — On Friday, in a letter to Google Apps users …
Context & Ripple Effects
The move follows a day of buildup: The Next Web reported on September 18 that Google was ready to unleash spiders on published Google Docs, and The Register's letter to Apps users confirms it is happening. It lands against an awkward backdrop — in March, a Google privacy bug shared users' docs without their permission, so any change that widens who can see Apps content gets read through that lens.
It also matters commercially. Business Week's May piece asked what's holding Google Apps back, with enterprise trust high on the list — and back in 2006, Chris Anderson argued the suite's power lay in embedded functionality that pulls Google services into everyday workflows. Crawling published docs extends that reach while testing exactly the trust question the suite's critics keep raising.
First-order effects
- Documents, spreadsheets, and presentations that Apps users have explicitly published to the web become crawlable and searchable, so anything a user marked public can now surface in search results alongside ordinary web pages.
Second-order effects
- For Microsoft and other hosted-office rivals selling to enterprises on confidentiality grounds, Google has handed them a fresh talking point: the same vendor whose March sharing bug embarrassed users is now indexing published files.
Third-order effects
- If published cloud documents become first-class search content, the line between 'a file I put online' and 'a page anyone can find' keeps eroding, pushing suites toward granular per-document visibility controls as standard practice rather than afterthought.
The trend: Cloud office suites are dissolving the boundary between private documents and the searchable web, forcing vendors to make publish-versus-private decisions explicit at the file level.