Cool Google trick: search file types

[zridling]

[via [url=http://www.robweir.com/blog/2007/05/so-where-are-all-ooxml-documents.html]Rob Wier[/url]]:

Google has a nice feature that allows you to search for documents that match a given file type. This is done by adding "filetype:NNN" to your query, where NNN corresponds to the file type. (Add an extra N for 4-letter formats.)

Here's a trend line of several terms.

[Lashiec]

Hey, that's neat! I'd like to add that I didn't know about this Google Trends, and it seems that docx is winning

[justice]

Note that the trendline is about newsitems that feature the fileformats in their acticle, not the amount of files of each type!

If for example there is a big scandal about docx, then the trendline would go up because of all the reports, without any additional docx files being indexed by google.

Unfortunately the filetype: query is not allowed within trends.

[Lashiec]

Oh, that's why it didn't return much information about some sound formats

[Mark0]

I use the filetype: search a lot, mostly for finding samples of some filetypes for creating new defs for TrID. One may be really surprised seeing how many files are left in pubblic (and thus index) areas!

[Veign]

Here's another file search trick in Google:
http://www.veign.com/blog/2005/09/google-file-search-trick.html