search engine giant first

Google has rarely included scanned documents in its search results because it had no way to determine the nature of the content, but that's about to change. The search engine giant says it will use optical character recognition (OCR) software to make it possible for Web surfers to search any Web-hosted document stored in the PDF file format developed by Adobe Systems.

Google is using the technology to convert scanned documents into equivalent text files that can be searched, indexed and returned as responses to Google search queries, noted Evin Levey, a Google product manager.