Plug-In Enables PDF Search

Google Desktop utility went live Monday, after about a six-month beta cycle. For the Acrobat faithful who had wondered if the 1.0 release would include support for PDF, the answer is no—but ScanSoft has brought to market a beta plug-in called OmniPage Search Indexer that not only supports PDFs containing text, but also can OCR and index image-based PDFs with scanned text and return the results on a locally served Google-type page.

"We're very pleased to be one of the first developers to work with Google and their new API to enable this," said Robert Weideman, senior vice president of marketing and product strategy for ScanSoft's Productivity Applications Division.

Weideman added that OmniPage Search Indexer also handles other image file formats such as BMP, MAX and TIFF. "We see this as an important event [for ScanSoft] and one we're evaluating, should we decide to support OmniPage Search Indexer with other desktop search products."

That's likely to happen, Weideman said, because there's a need. Most companies that offer desktop search utilities—like Google, Yahoo!, Ask Jeeves and Microsoft Corp.'s MSN—live in the Internet search space, where there is little call for image-based document search, as most companies don't post faxes and scans of paper documents to the Web. So search vendors don't develop tools to search them.