Search spiders to crawl over Google documents

Documents created using Google Apps will soon appear in search engine results, a Google employee has revealed.

According to a forum post from 'Google Employee Marie', the change will occur in about two weeks, and will enable enable documents, spreadsheets and presentations created using Google Apps to be published, crawled and indexed.

Only documents that have been explicitly published using the publish as web page' or the publish/embed' option, and were linked from a publicly crawled webpage, will show up.

As the post explains: "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."

Marie signs off the post explaining that: "This is a very exciting change as your published docs linked to from public websites [sic] will reach a much wider audience of people. I'll let everyone know when this change is live, and we will add a Help Center article with more information at that time."

One poster replying to the announcement debated whether two weeks was enough notice for such a change, arguing that users with "private" but published documents would be upset when they suddenly showed up in search engine results.

Google had not yet responded to our request for comment at the time of publication.