A WebmasterWorld thread named Google indexed the content of my zip files reports Google indexing (temporarily) ZIP files. One member reports, "the site: command search is bringing up a list of the zipped video files on my site... google has attempted to index all of the content of each of the zip files, it's showing up as gibberish text surrounding the filename that's inside the zip file." I tried this for some of my sites, but found nothing at this time. The member later came back to report that "it now appears that google has stopped listing the zip files as part of the site: search."

But it is very interesting to see Google trying to do this and also trying to figure out the contents of the Zip file. Danny once added this request (indexing ZIP files) for the Google Desktop Search product back in October 14, 2004, "A real personal wish is for indexing of content of compressed/zip files. I constantly zip up data -- right now, none of that gets indexed by the tool." Maybe Google is working on this now? Not sure if this was the first report of Google indexing ZIP files or not...

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