PDFs on Gigablast

Matt Wells of Gigablast announces that "Gigablast now indexes PDF documents." To limit a search to PDF files, Gigablast uses a different command than the other search engines:

Use type:pdf rather than the more standard 'filetype:'.

To exclude PDF files, add type:text to a search. Matt also says that Gigablast "will support other file types in the future." Gigablast review updated.

But remember, Gigablast defaults to OR, so a search like nutrition type:pdf is actually looking for any page with 'nutrition' OR and PDF file. The nutrition search finds zero results with both. To force it to work as expected, remember to add the + symbol, as in +nutrition +type:pdf.

The search results display gives a big PDF logo in front of all the PDF files, but most do not include extracts. That makes it hard to determine what the file is about since many PDF file names are not very helpful. On the plus side, Gigablast is the only other search engine other than Google than includes an HTML version of the PDF. Click on the [cached] link after any PDF to see the HTML version used for indexing.

It is great to see this included on Gigablast, especially for the cache availability. But in several quick searches, most of the PDFs are fairly short ones. I found few from .gov sites as well. So the underlying database needs to expand, but this is a great start.