September 21, 2005
Google Desktop Search
Have you tried Google Desktop Search?
It’s actually pretty cool.. I installed it on my machine at home a couple of weeks ag, and one especially neat thing it does (beyond finding lost files on computers) is it optically recognizes scanned documents!
So for example, when I lost my one-year Metrocard, I was trying to find the statement that came with the card when I first got it. I had scanned it, but as a pdf file, so normally it would be a huge challenge to find (since obviously the scanned document is just an image.)
Well Google Desktop Search found it! It recognized the words in the document and pulled it up as a result when I searched for “Transitcheck.”
Isn’t that awesome?!
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September 22nd, 2005 at 12:38 pm
I’d be interested to know if GDS did something special or if you’re just noticing a function of Acrobat that creates searchable PDFs (in which case, other Desktop Search engines would work the same way).
September 22nd, 2005 at 10:07 pm
Hmm, I don’t think that Acrobat is creating searchable pdf’s, but that’s something interesting to investigate. I have a very old (and free) version of Acrobat, so it’s hard to see Acrobat as creating searchable pdf’s. I’ve been scanning the documents using a Canon LiDE 30..
One way to test would be to try another desktop search and see if it finds a scanned document image. It doesn’t seem that Microsoft’s Desktop search utility is able to search scanned pdf files though.
October 12th, 2005 at 6:45 pm
[...] //www.pdfzone.com/article2/0,1895,1773949,00.asp”>article confirming that, yes indeed, Google Desktop Search can read scanned pdf files!
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