By Callaghan89 on

A few of my articles are written in PDF, and it has come to my attention, that they arent search by google's search engines (I think)

Is there a module or way I can, as a novice, get these documents searched via google as such?

Note: I haven't found anytihng I can try so far, so I am open to options.
I am also a big novice.

Cheers
Callaghan

⋅ Categories: Drupal 6.x

Comments

vm’s picture

vm commented

as far as I know, google does not search inside files.

Callaghan89’s picture

Callaghan89 commented

Sure. I am assuming there is a solution through perhaps (hopefully) a drupal module.

Many websites out there seem to have this capability.

vm’s picture

vm commented

http://drupal.org/project/search_files = will help with your own drupal search on your site searching inside files

Though I've no idea if it helps with google handling of internal text in a file. Please link to a site that does so.

Callaghan89’s picture

Callaghan89 commented

this may work. can anyone confirm?

Any other suggestions?

Callaghan89’s picture

Callaghan89 commented

Anyone?

TallDavid’s picture

TallDavid commented

Google DOES search inside PDF files. See: http://www.google.com/help/faq_filetypes.html

If Google can find these files, it can index them. You might consider installing the XMLSitemap module to help the search engines find all of the files on your site. http://drupal.org/project/xmlsitemap

will_kelly’s picture

will_kelly commented

A lot of people have pdf's with not text in them to be indexed.

In order for your .pdf to be indexed it needs to be formatted properly. Much of the software out there creates .pdf documents as large image files. Google cannot index these because they are really images and not text files.

The easiest way to tell if your .pdf can be indexed is to drag your cursor over the copy. If the text is highlighted by the cursor it may have the ability to become indexed.

Another challenge is file size. A file that is to large can also hang on indexing and this will work against you as well.

Make your .pdf browser ready so that it displays inside as opposed to being downloaded or opened in Adobe Reader.

Callaghan89’s picture

Callaghan89 commented

My files are small, and my document text can be highlighted. I have a program in word where I can "save as" a .pdf file.

The files are then uploaded to my drupal server on godaddy.com hosting and linked on my website appropriately.

However, when I do a "quoted" google search for copy/pasted text from a pdf file, the search yields no results.

I have tried this numerous time, however the file is not being found.

sonobor’s picture

sonobor commented

Yes Google and all major search engines can index PDFs with layered text.

Here are a couple ways you can have your own search results for your PDFs and DOCs too.

Apache Solr -- it definitely can search PDF and DOC contents but requires server configuration.

WrenSoft -- it you place all your PDFs in one directory, you might get by with their free version. Their PHP version might be a pain to use. I think it requires manual re-indexing. I've used it in a Windows environment and it works very well.

Manual Approach. If you only have a few files, Install Module file node. There's a real node for each file with a redirect to the linked file for your choice of user roles. In this case, you manually paste your unformatted contents right into the node. Drupal will index the contents. Google will still be redirected to the file and index the PDF as usual. The standard internal Drupal search engine will index the node since it has the permissions to view the node and will not try to index the attached PDF.

tiwiex’s picture

tiwiex commented

I configured search files and indexed a pdf folder. There are 29 files there and everytime i run search-index on drush, 29 files are imdexed. Search-Status reveals no more files to index. When i do a search, it reveals no content from the pdf. But the search kind of resets my index and reveals 29 files unindexed. What am I doing wrong?