DON'T Make PDFs Searchable?

Fellow blogger Patrick C. Walsh had an interesting post today about Google's recent move in making imaged PDFs searchable on the World Wide Web.

Mr. Walsh thinks searchability can be a bad thing when it comes to document imaging. And, frankly, after hearing him out, he may have a point.

Here's his post, and here is the nut graph on why PDFs don't need to be searchable in most cases:

"I have been told that searchable PDFs will be a very good thing for intranets but I just don’t get it. The poor users put their search terms in and, as all documents are searchable, they will get a mountain of results back. Then, when they click on a result, it will land them on a document containing the search term.

This can be a problem as a lot of documents aren’t set up like the best web pages and if they are PDFs from external sources, e.g. legislation, H & S advice etc., you won’t be able to change them anyway. The problem is context."

This is absolutely true that context can be a problem with searchable PDFs. If the users do not find search intuitive and easy to use, search isn't much use.

In that sense, Walsh may be correct in stating that for the average corporation, making scanned docs searchable across the enterprise may not be best allocation of resources. Better to file appropriate scanned docs in appropriate folders...

And make people search the old-fashioned way: using their brains, instead of relying on keywords.