[extension]

Perhaps I'm missing something but wasn't the "publishing documents on the internet" problem solved long ago by The World Wide Web? Or is the purpose of Scribd to recreate the magical experience of reading various dead tree formats, even though it doesn't actually do that?

[tdavis]

It isn't solved until it is wrapped in a proprietary, inaccessible, bloated format like Flash. Or rendered within Javascript so you can get cool page-turning effects. Or put in a PDF inside a PowerPoint which can then be downloaded via a link on a site. Or... I am out of asinine ideas.

[dbrush]

Or a company might decide to try to solve the problem by gathering and indexing all of these documents so they are more accessible than if they were spattered over thousands of locations, unsearchable, and cost time and money to find.

[tdavis]

So I can trade hard-to-find but easy-to-consume for easy-to-find but hard-to-consume? That isn't really my definition of "progress". Oh, and in reality, these documents are actually less accessible once they are indexed and put in Flash, if we're using the definition of Web Accessibility.

I would also like to be given an example of something that you found hard to find via normal means but was easy to find via one of these document repositories. I am still wildly unconvinced of your general claim. Google is pretty good at the whole text indexing thing.

[Maro]

Like Google?

[dbrush]

Can you click a button and make Google index new content on your site?

Do you use Google video search before you use Youtube?

[briansmith]

If you use Google Custom Search, you can get indexing on demand.

Also, if you use sitemaps correctly Google will update your content in its main index pretty quickly.