40. About Advanced Desktop Searching

BEFORE YOU BEGIN	SEE ALSO
About Google Search Operators About Power Searching Strategies	Search Your PC with Google Desktop

Google Desktop enables you to use all the advanced searching tools that you normally use with Google, including search operators, as detailed in About Google Search Operators. Using these search operators can help narrow your search results tremendously.

Some other Google advanced searching features can help as well. Probably the most useful is the file type filter. This comes in handy when you want to only find a file, and especially a file of a particular file type. For example, let's say that you want to find a Word file with the word clone in it. You could type this search string in the Google Desktop search box:

Clone filetype:doc

This search returns all Word files on your hard disk with the word clone in them. To do this kind of file type search, you need to know the extension of the file for which you are looking. Table 6.1 shows common file types that Google Desktop can search for, along with their extensions.

Table 6.1. Common File Extensions

File Type	Extension
Word	doc
Excel	xls
PowerPoint	ppt
Adobe Acrobat	pdf
Text files	txt