San Francisco — Google clearly wants users to have a smooth experience when using its search engine. The search titan has just unfolded a novel option to view PDF files in search results — by providing the Quick View facility that would display these PDFs right onto the browser with all the PDF formating features intact.
Although in the past, it was only possible to view these PDFs by clicking on “View as HTML,” without compromising on the original formatting, such as graphics, tables and fonts, before being downloaded as PDF documents to view them in a separate viewer application.
“Google search results sometimes include documents that were not originally formatted to be viewed in a web browser, such as PDFs. In the past, the only way to view these documents was to download them and open them in a separate viewer application. To provide an alternative, we made it possible to quickly and easily view these files as HTML right in a web browser by clicking ‘View as HTML’,” Krista Davis, software engineer, and Raj Krishnan, product manager, wrote.
Unfortunately, opening through the HTML converter usually meant losing out on much of the details and advanced objects like tables or graphics so Google came up with a better solution. And again, downloading a large PDF file is a bit cumbersome process. So with the new feature, all you have to do is to click on the “Quick View” link and Google will open the PDF file on the browser using the same technology used in Google Docs and Gmail which preserves the PDFs formats.
PDF files often show up in searches especially for more official documents. According to Google, around 50% of the PDFs in their index can now be viewed using this “Quick View” feature. Google said that it had so far rolled out the links to more than half of the PDFs in its search index. The new links will appear at the end of the second line of the result, underneath the title of the query.
The new links corresponds to the same technology that is used by Google Docs and Gmail. Google says they have actually been rolling out the feature in search results since July, and now they have more than half of the PDFs in their index available this way.
When you click on the “Quick View” link, it will open the PDF in your browser, and will look something like this:
With the new integrated PDF viewer from Google, users will now be able to preview PDF files right inside the browser utilizing the simple and lightweight interface. The tool delivers all of the basic features of a PDF viewer: users can go to the page they desire, have a thumbnail preview in the right-hand side and zoom in and out of the document. The files are rendered as they were intended and there is no quality loss.
Google recently gave webmasters a new way to display PDFs (as well as PPTs and TIFFs). They launched the Google Docs Viewer, which displays these types of files directly in a user’s web browser without requiring a download. The tool for this can be found here.
In a related news, Google chief executive Eric Schmidt is reported to have said at a New York press conference yesterday that the company had seen signs that Europe is starting to recover from the financial crisis.
Schmidt also acknowledged the recent Gmail outages, and said that the company would work to fix future ones more quickly.