A not so well-guarded secret of Google amongst people who’ve researched Google’s capabilities is that you can find individual filetypes, especially PDFs.
That being said, most people have never realized the full extent of that power, nor figured out the number of different FileTypes available to search.
It can be a little tedious to use filetype modifiers in Google for every search, so we went ahead and set up individual search engines for each of these filetypes, and even made search engines that combine filetypes into groups. For instance, instead of just searching for XLSX and CSV files in different engines, you can use the “Spreadsheet Search Engine” to search those combined with the other spreadsheet filetypes.
- Document Search Engine
- SpreadSheet Search Engine
- Presentation Search Engine
- Source Code Search Engine
- BAS
- C/++: .c, .cc, .cpp, .cxx, .h, .hpp
- CS
- JAVA
- PL
- PY
Hopefully you find at least 1 or 2 of these filetypes enrich a project you’re working on. At the very least, I’d recommend using the PDF search engine to find a book on a topic you’re interested in. There are so many great books available for free, that nobody knows about.
I included a bonus way to find PDFs, as I’m always finding new ways to search and find exclusive, accurate results. In this bonus method, we search for files for free download in Google Drive with the name PDF, but not necessarily with PDF in it’s URL. This is a great way to find further free books, free textbooks, and research documents.
If you have suggestions on more filetypes to search and add, or more methods to find those filetypes, I’ll look them over and get those search engines rolling.