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Originally Posted by Parody
It's not normally providers, it's whatever is showing the PDF. Sometimes it's the Reader plugin or another local PDF viewer plugin; Firefox and Chrome (and many derived browsers) have their own implementations, some websites use server-side or HTML based renderers, and who knows what else.
For years I've had to deal with people complaining that "this PDF I got from your website doesn't work" because they were viewing them in their browser. I highly encourage everyone to disable all PDF plugins/extensions/etc. and always download and open PDFs locally.
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I'm talking specifically about document uploading sites, e.g. SlideShare, Scribd etc.
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If you can reach it, so can the search engines.
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Not necessarily - I'd imagine most cloud storage providers lock out crawlers. If even I can make a site invisible to search engines via robots.txt or, more brutally, .htaccess, I'm pretty sure Dropbox and co. will have thought about file protection as well.
That said, my disclaimer still applies: if it's publicly accessible, it's publicly accessible. It may not be easy to find, but unless you gate the document with a login, people *can* still find it, however unlikely that may be.