If a file is placed into Google Cloud storage and made public, but a URL to the file does not exist on another webpage, does Google index it in its search results anyway? Anyone know?
2 Answers
1
votes
Google's search index is independent of its cloud storage. Making a file public in cloud storage does not automatically index it in Google's search results.
However, asking this question leads me to believe that you're probably wondering if it's okay to make a file public and be reasonably sure that the file is not accessible to anyone. If the files are of any sensitive nature to you or your users, this is not the right solution.
If you're using GCS on a website and want to serve files securely, you might want to try the Signed URLs option. If it's just about being indexed, you could add a robots.txt file to the root of your bucket that excludes the file from being indexed.
0
votes
If you have a public file in Google's cloud storage, the URL to that file would have to be indexed, otherwise the servers would have no way of finding it.
The same thing happens with Google Drive. A public URL is still indexed, and is still available within the server's lookup tables, even if a hard link doesn't exist anywhere on the web.
