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Scribd let's people who don't know how to put their pdf, word doc, powerpoint, etc online and make it look good put it online and make it look good. And it's ea

by justin 17y ago

Scribd let's people who don't know how to put their pdf, word doc, powerpoint, etc online and make it look good put it online and make it look good. And it's easy. Who else does that?

axod 17y ago
The most popular content on scribd is actually stupid text files, and images. (Check the most popular by views, all time). Yes. Text, and images, wrapped up and 'streamed' to a flash player. Call me crazy, but I think that's bad for the web. Those text files and images should be free to roam. Not caged up in a horrible flash player. Add to that their aggressive google SEO, and it's a bad bad situation. experts-exchange.com has 1.5m entries in google.com whilst scribd.com has 16m !!!
- vaksel 17y ago
  scribd seems to spam google a lot, I always find scribd in my results and when you go to the page there is nothing relevant to what I was looking for.
  - paraschopra 17y ago
    That is why I have avoided clicking on Scribd results, no matter how alluring the document is.
- justin 17y ago
  Not all documents that contain text can easily be turned into HTML documents that preserve the original formatting and are readable. That is certainly true for the vast majority of people outside the readers of Hacker News. Actually, it's probably true for many of the people who _do_ read Hacker News. Scribd clearly serves a purpose here. If you don't like the presentation (Flash), then don't go to Scribd links off of Google. In fact, you could probably write yourself a Greasemonkey plugin that removes Scribd results from your Google results in 10 minutes! Edit: Alternatively, there's probably another startup in here that does exactly what Scribd does but instead of using Flash just uses HTML and CSS. Then you'd have the best of both worlds, in theory, if it matters that much to the user.
  - drusenko 17y ago
    Google Apps does an awesome job at displaying PDFs in pure HTML without using flash. Not sure how they do it, but it's pretty awesome.

by justin 17y ago

Scribd let's people who don't know how to put their pdf, word doc, powerpoint, etc online and make it look good put it online and make it look good. And it's easy. Who else does that?

axod 17y ago

The most popular content on scribd is actually stupid text files, and images. (Check the most popular by views, all time). Yes. Text, and images, wrapped up and 'streamed' to a flash player. Call me crazy, but I think that's bad for the web. Those text files and images should be free to roam. Not caged up in a horrible flash player. Add to that their aggressive google SEO, and it's a bad bad situation. experts-exchange.com has 1.5m entries in google.com whilst scribd.com has 16m !!!

vaksel 17y ago
scribd seems to spam google a lot, I always find scribd in my results and when you go to the page there is nothing relevant to what I was looking for.
- paraschopra 17y ago
  That is why I have avoided clicking on Scribd results, no matter how alluring the document is.
justin 17y ago
Not all documents that contain text can easily be turned into HTML documents that preserve the original formatting and are readable. That is certainly true for the vast majority of people outside the readers of Hacker News. Actually, it's probably true for many of the people who _do_ read Hacker News. Scribd clearly serves a purpose here. If you don't like the presentation (Flash), then don't go to Scribd links off of Google. In fact, you could probably write yourself a Greasemonkey plugin that removes Scribd results from your Google results in 10 minutes! Edit: Alternatively, there's probably another startup in here that does exactly what Scribd does but instead of using Flash just uses HTML and CSS. Then you'd have the best of both worlds, in theory, if it matters that much to the user.
- drusenko 17y ago
  Google Apps does an awesome job at displaying PDFs in pure HTML without using flash. Not sure how they do it, but it's pretty awesome.