Why is it Google can search the entire Internet in less time than it take Adobe Reader to search a PDF?
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Google vs Adobe7 comments to Google vs AdobeLeave a Reply |
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Copyright © 2012 Daniel Stutzbach - All Rights Reserved |
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because Google search engines run on Machines of God, and Adobe Reader runs on your machine
Google Desktop can also search my entire machine faster than Adobe Reader can search one PDF!
caching.
Searching the internet is grep+graph theory, while PDF rendering is turing complete with a brain-dead execution model involving too much useless intermediate rendering (in the common case – but you can’t get rid of it because there exist cases that require it).
Google Desktop even searches inside PDFs!
When a PDF is generated, couldn’t they just save a computer-readable index inside?
PDFs have long strings of plaintext in them, and google indexes the plaintext. Or maybe they are smarter – I dunno. But I do know that the postscript and PDF execution model requires treating the document as a program and going through a few potentially pretty slow stages. Adobe Acrobat is a bit of a pig here – xpdf is a lot faster and so is Preview.app – but there’s still a lower limit to the amount of time it requires to show a PDF simply because it’s actually a program and not just a bunch of plain text.
I totally misread your question. I was thinking search the internet versus open a PDF. As far as searching, Adobe Acrobat is just plain retarded.