Date: Tue, 18 Mar 2003 00:13:44 -0500
From: Will Mitchell
To: suggestions@google.com
Subject: suggestion on PDF links

Dear Google,

I have a suggestion for you. I think it's extremely useful that google is 
able to turn certain document-types such as PDF into html. This feature 
works great and from time to time it really adds useful returns to my 
searches. However, a lot of the overhead of opening adobe acrobat, which 
happens automatically when clicking on the main result links presented by 
google, can be a real pain. You've done a good job of making the file 
format visible, but despite that, I often don't notice that I'm clicking 
on a PDF link until it's too late. Performance and annoyance varies from 
platform to platform.

I would like to suggest that you add an option to your preferences page, 
allowing users to *switch* the main link of the result with the "view as 
html" link. In other words, when this preference is toggled "on", the 
main link will be the html-ized link, and the sub-link will read "view as 
original pdf".

I hope this sounds like a good suggestion to you. I have included some 
anecdotal evidence below in the hopes of convincing you.

Thanks,

Will Mitchell

*** BEGIN ANECDOTAL EVIDENCE ***

x freepizza x: BASTARD ACROBAT DIE
x freepizza x: pdfs are the ultimate fuck
x freepizza x: no
x freepizza x: 2nd ultimate
x freepizza x: postscript is the ultimate
johnjosephbachir: i like pdf's pretty well
x freepizza x: i do to
x freepizza x: but they should be caged
x freepizza x: i want the main link in google to be the html-ized version
x freepizza x: and the sublink to be the original pdf
johnjosephbachir: right
x freepizza x: i will write a suggestion to google, for their preferences 
page
johnjosephbachir: yeah that consistently fucks me