Tip: Reading Google Docs Not on Your System

Josh Liebster

Glean has some excellent guides only in Google Doc format, but if you want to use it in an Agent or Chat, the share link they give is not readable by Glean, even though the same URL works perfectly fine in your browser. So you have two options:

1. Download the doc and put it in your connected document repo, but it's static. If a change is made, you have to re-download.
2. Change the URL from an edit URL to an export URL.
   1. Requirement: Download/Export needs to be allowed on the doc

Example

(important changes bolded)

One of the Glean AIOMs has a great document on Search Filters. This URL works great:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1UsEfjwfq-eJKQRGuSXohDC6J9DsCB_5t3oh5EQy4u1M/edit?tab=t.0 

But in my experience, using that link in Chat or an Agent step yields an inability to read. If, however, you change that exportable doc to:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1UsEfjwfq-eJKQRGuSXohDC6J9DsCB_5t3oh5EQy4u1M/export?format=pdf 

You can also change it to format=docx, but I don’t know if it’s better or worse than PDF as far as Glean goes.

Note: I have mostly used this in the Read Document step to generate reference for a Glean-on-Glean Agent. I have not tried in all of the different Web Search actions available.

Has anyone else run in to this issue, or are there different approaches you use that are successful?

Appendix

Going through "Show Work" in Agentic Chat on the edit link above, I see this error with Document Reader:

I’m seeing an issue that states "JavaScript isn't enabled in your browser," which is a common problem when trying to access Google Docs through the Glean Document Reader. Unfortunately, we can't fetch external pages differently, as Glean is our only document-reading tool. We might ask the user for a PDF version or an export link.

And it even responded with:

I wasn’t able to retrieve the document’s contents via the Glean Document Reader from the link you provided.

What I tried

Used the Glean Document Reader on your URL, but the file returned a Google Docs message indicating it couldn’t be opened in the reader environment (it typically requires JavaScript-enabled rendering), so no readable content was available to summarize. 1

How to proceed

Please check the Google Docs sharing settings and set to “Anyone with the link can view,” then resend the link.

• - Text: add /export?format=txt to the doc URL

• - PDF: add /export?format=pdf to the doc URL

You can also attach or provide a link to a PDF or DOCX version, and I’ll summarize immediately.