On September 18th, Google announced that they will start crawling any published Google Docs that are linked to from a public website. Those docs will not only be crawled but also indexed which means they could appear in search results.
I’m not a Google Docs user, in fact, anything that can give Google more access then they already have with the data on my computer, is in my estimation “Not Good”.
One thing we know is that whenever Google gets its hands on data, it loves to share it with the world, despite copyright laws or trademark laws. Just look at their Google Books program – rather than obeying copyright laws, it indexed tens of thousands of books and published them online.
Rather than getting permission from the various authors guilds and writers associations, they just posted the material which lead to a 3 year court battle where the Authors Guild, the Association of American Publishers and a handful of authors and publishers eventually settled with Google and agreed to let them post those books online. Copyright Laws Be Damned!
I can promise you that at some point in the future, any content you post to Google Docs will show up online, despite the fact that you never published it or linked to it from a publicly crawled website.
Just be careful, don’t use Google Docs for sensitive data – remember, once something is posted online, it is there forever.
Trevor Walter is senior marketing director and vice president of Freelance Marketing Group www.trevorwalter.com :: www.fmgconsultants.com