Google will soon begin to crawl and index all Google Docs that are published and externally linked to.

A post on the Google Doc\'s help forum announced on Friday, “[i]n about two weeks we will be launching a change for published docs. The change will allow published docs that are linked to from a public website to be crawled and indexed, which means they can appear in search results you see on Google.com and other search engines.”

Making sure your docs can’t be accessed is fairly straight forward though as users need only “unpublish” docs. The news may send companies that share Google Docs into a bit of a spin though, as they have just two weeks to review their security settings and ensure that published docs of a more sensitive nature won’t turn up on search engine results pages.

The update does however mean that users who want to reach as wide an audience as possible through their published docs will now be exposed to search engines.