Google to Fix filetype: Search?

At Search Engine Land, Danny has a long report about Google indexing and ranking issues. While other sections of the post talk about an update to the visible PageRank, issues with supplemental results, and duplicate content, I found the short section on the filetype: command most interesting. Like some of Google's other field search prefix commands, filetype: results in zero records unless it is combined with another search term. So filetype:xls finds nothing, but this is supposed to change sometime in the future and will finally let us run a filetype:search without requiring an additional term. Does this mean that other field searches will be able to be run separately as well? We'll have to wait and see. In the meantime, if you'd like to get all the results Google will give you for some unusual file type, there is an easy way around the additional term requirement.

Just add the extension itself. For WordPerfect files, try filetype:wpd wpd. While I don't share Danny's concern about size wars resulting from this change, just remember that the number of results that Google estimates is a very broad and inaccurate number. The "about 853,000" results from the search above is probably accurate, give or take 400,000 results. You'll only be able to view 1,000 at most. Where this search is more useful is for a very unusual extension like ".junk" (if it were a real extension). That search actually finds several hundred files that Google thinks are .junk files: filetype:junk junk. How's that for a junk query?

I should also note that Google is working on fixing a few other inconsistencies. For example, Danny mentions that

Sometimes a search on a Google country specific site (like Google UK) apparently wasn't showing the home page of a web site if pages were narrowed down to a particular country. A fix for this is happening.