How to Find Specific File Types with Google

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Gary for Expert Village. Google has a way to search for certain types of documents, specifying which document we want to appear in our search results, and that's a very convenient tool because sometimes we're looking for specific results that we want to find a particular type of document like a PDF file, or an excel spreadsheet, and we can specify that in a syntax called file type. Let's see how it works. We're going to do two searches, one with the syntax, one without, and we'll see the different results that we get. Now let's say we're looking for the financial statements for the company IBM. So if I just type in IBM financial statements, we get a lot of results with web sites that will show different types of information about the financial statements, but nothing here that specifically gives us the actual financial statements for the company. I'm sure that it's probably located in one of these sites, but instead of going around to all the different sites, here we have notes of the financial statements, and here we have a site that's from Google which is not, which could give us the results, but is not from the company itself. So let's see how, what, what the search would look like if we type in a syntax called file type, and I'm not going to put any spaces. I'm going to put a colon, I'm going to put PDF. And this is going to give us a PDF file, which is Adobe Acrobat reader file, and it would give us the results only those files, only PDF files in the results. And here we can pretty much see that if there was going to be any kind of financial statements, they might appear in a document, like a PDF document, and if we go through the results we see that we have here a, we have our second result is actually Director's Report and financial statements. I will click on that, and again, it's going to be in a pdf format because that's what we selected, and when we click on it we see that it actually comes up as a nice pdf document as almost looks like a brochure. We see the title is called Director's Report and Financial Statements, and if we scroll through it, we see that this could be a document that they actually sent out to stockholders or anyone requiring information, and that's usually what a pdf document is, it usually is some kind of more graphical brochure type, and we see as we scroll down we have the Director's Report and description of what's contained in the report, definitions, and if we go down all the way we can actually see proper financial statements for the company. So we see that by doing the file type for a pdf, or if you think that it's in a different type of file format, an excel spreadsheet, or a Word document (doc), we can just type in that syntax file type, and then put the colon without spaces and put the three letter extension that the file type is associated with. The word document is a doc file. The pdf, the Acrobat reader is a pdf file, and so forth."