Tips & Tricks: Better Seach Results

Looking for a Needle in the Haystack?

Despite advances in search engine technology, anyone researching a subject or looking for a particular document or file often needs to scroll through multiple screens of results. Here's a quick trick that could save some time sorting through non-relevant search engine results. Just have the search engine of your choice – it works on all the major ones – only return results for the type of file you want.

For example, when looking for product manuals of any type, search for only PDFs since most are produced in that format. Just conclude the search string with filetype:PDF and only PDF files will come up in the results.

This tip works for any type of file.