What is “filetype:xy”?
filetype:xy is a search expression that is supported by multiple search engines (including Google and DuckDuckGo). When entering filetype:pdf rss, you get primarily PDF files for your search term “rss”.
When you enter filetype:pptx napoleon, you’ll get PowerPoint presentations related to Napoleon… If you need to talk about this at school, this could save you some time 😉.
Why “filetype:pdf” is sometimes superior?
Have you ever tried to find information about a topic, but only got pieces of the puzzle?
Nowadays, we live in a world that is all about subscriptions. You subscribe to video-on-demand providers (Amazon Prime Video, Netflix, …), to audio-on-demand providers (Spotify), to cloud storage (Dropbox, Google Drive, …), to Gaming services (PlayStation Plus, Xbox Live, …), maybe to news outlets, to Adobe products, etc. But these were the paid subscriptions. There are also subscriptions without cost, including most of the content creators online.
- There are some on social networks like YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, etc.
- There are also blogs online that you can subscribe to by entering your email address or via RSS The thing they have in common: Those providers of content want to keep you on the hook as long as possible, usually because of financial reasons.
The problem: When searching for information about a specific topic, those content providers don’t want to give you all you need or want at once, because then, you are gone and don’t watch their advertisements anymore.
The solution: filetype:pdf. Let me give you 2 examples…
Diet
You want to get the relevant information about the basics of diet / healthy diet…
The usual search
- You enter “diet” or “healthy diet” into a search engine and find…
- a blog… Blog post 1 tells you about fruits, blog post 2 tells you about whole grains, blog post 3 is some kind of clickbait about what you should never eat, etc.
- a website that only shows links to articles on the main page.
- search results like “10 things to (not) do”
- Or you go to social media and search for it there and get an endless feed of tweets, reels, posts, … without any structure and without risking to exceed the average attention span of the users there.
With both options, you are starting an endless journey getting puzzle pieces of the whole topic piece by piece.
”filetype:pdf”
- You enter “filetype:pdf diet” into your search engine.
- In my case (from Germany), I get multiple PDFs on page 1 from German health insurers (https://www.aok.de/pk/magazin/cms/fileadmin/pk/plus/pdf/curaplan-gesund-lecker-essen.pdf), a PDF from the ministry of health (https://www.bundesgesundheitsministerium.de/fileadmin/Dateien/5_Publikationen/Gesundheit/Broschueren/190731_66Tipps-barrierefrei.pdf) and some from some German institutes.
- All of them are well structured and provide you the information you need in one single file you can usually read in less than 1 hour without any cliffhangers.
A software
I wanted to see what the software “QGIS” is capable of.
The usual search
- You enter “qgis” into a search engine and see their website, sites you can download it from, a Wikipedia article, a LinkedIn page of something remotely related, some sites of people using it to solve specific problems, etc. In my opinion, the Wikipedia article is the most useful of them. The website is also interesting, because it has a link to the documentation of it.
”filetype:pdf”
- In the search results, I immediately find their documentation (user guide): https://docs.qgis.org/3.4/pdf/en/QGIS-3.4-UserGuide-en.pdf
- There are also step by step introductions: https://wocat.net/documents/1077/WOCAT_FAO_Tutorial_QGIS.pdf, https://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/international/usrcc/training/qgis/Basic_Tutorial_on_QGIS.pdf, https://www.refugeeinfoturkey.org/repo/Toolkit/CapacityBuilding/GIS/02+-+Step+by+Step+QGIS.pdf
Conclusion
To be clear: It is:
- not a solution for everyone
- not a solution for every search
I started liking this kind of search, especially when you want to get the bigger picture of something in only one file. Web pages link to other pages via hyperlinks. Blog posts are linked to each other via the website it is hosted on. Social media posts are linked to each other via the channel that posts them or via closed-source-algorithms of the tech companies. The advantage of PDF files compared to websites or social media posts is the fact that the PDF files usually have a start and an end and in between, there is all the information. They usually don’t link to a part 2.
Apart from that, people who write the PDFs (or generate them based on some text they wrote) are usually more experienced with the topic they write about. The WHO publishes PDF files, your neighbor who trusts in homeopathy or essential oils doesn’t usually do that. One exception to this that I don’t want to keep unmentioned: There are unfortunately many PDF files on the internet that are just some PowerPoint files that were converted to PDF. Those can be lower quality…
Maybe, LLMs can already give similar results or will be able to do one day… I’ve been using “filetype:PDF” for many years (LLMs weren’t yet invented when I learned about it), and I can fully recommend learning this search technique.