Google Filetype Search: How to Search for PDF Files

Our manual grinder page is nearly ready. But it's missing something that makes a real difference in any content: numbers.

How much coffee does the UK import? Is coffee consumption going up or down? Where are world coffee prices heading?

Those numbers don't live in blog posts. They live in reports: from bodies like the US Department of Agriculture, the International Coffee Organization, and the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization.

And those reports are usually files: PDF or Excel.

That's where the filetype: operator comes in.

filetype: the type of file

Read it as: "PDF files only, with the word coffee".

The International Coffee Organization's statistics page has the word coffee, but it's a normal web page, not a file. So it's gone.

And notice the words we used: plain and general. Report titles are often dry and formal, so a short word from the topic finds more of them than a long, specific phrase. Keep that in mind; we'll come back to it.

The types you'll need

There's another operator that does the same job: ext:, like ext:pdf coffee. Pick one and get used to it.

How does Google know the type of a file?

You might think Google looks at the end of the link: if it ends in .pdf, it's a PDF.

But Google says in its documentation that it knows the type from two things: the file's extension, or the content type the server sends with the file.

Look at these files:

The FAO report's link ends in /content, with no pdf in it at all. And the US Department of Agriculture report has its .pdf after the question mark at the end of the link.

Both are PDF files, and both show up with filetype:pdf.

And what about the file's title?

Open the International Coffee Organization's report for October 2025 and look at the file's properties. Its title is: "Microsoft Word - cmr-1025".

That's not a mistake in the lesson. That's the title saved inside the file itself.

A PDF's title is whatever the author's software saved in it. Often that's the name of the Word file it was made from.

Google often builds a better title from the text. But not always.

The result? If you search for words you expect in a report's title, the report might not come up, because its title isn't what you expected.

filetype with site: the right publisher

A PDF doesn't mean a trusted source. Anyone can upload a PDF.

That's why who published it matters more than the type of file. And here we combine filetype: with site::

Reports from the US Department of Agriculture that mention coffee and the United Kingdom. The department publishes regular reports on the coffee trade worldwide, and market reports for dozens of countries.

The International Coffee Organization's monthly coffee market report.

And this one is from the site lesson: any PDF on any UK government site, with the word coffee.

And the reverse: no files

Sometimes PDF files flood the results and you want web pages. Exclude them:

You found the number. Before you use it

This is the most important step, and the one people forget most.

Before you put any number on your page, ask four questions:

1. 1Who published the file? An official body? A research firm? Or a blog quoting another source? If it's quoting, go to the original source.
2. 2When? A report from 2018 won't tell you anything about the market today.
3. 3What's the unit? International coffee reports measure in "thousand bags, 60 kg each". A number like 1,200 there means a million and 200 thousand bags, not 1,200 tonnes.
4. 4What exactly does it measure? Imports aren't consumption. And green coffee isn't roasted coffee.

The right number from a clear source makes your page a reference. Other sites might quote you and link to you. And a wrong number wrecks the reader's trust in the whole page.

Exercise 1

The practical test

A thinking test

You found a blog post that says: "the UK imports a million bags of coffee a year", with no source.

Do you quote the number?

No. Use what you've learned: site:usda.gov filetype:pdf coffee "United Kingdom", or the International Coffee Organization's report, and look for the number in the source itself. If you find it, write it with its year, its unit and its source. If you don't, don't write it.

Before the next lesson

• filetype:pdf or ext:pdf PDF files only.
• -filetype:pdf no PDF files.
• site:gov.uk filetype:pdf the type and the publisher together.
• Google knows a file's type even when the link doesn't say.

Notice that the most important of the number's questions was "when?". An old report can mislead you. In the next lesson we'll learn to set the time range of the results with two operators: before: and after:.