Find Public Google Docs

Google Docs and Google Drive don't offer the option to find {public files}, but you can do that using Google search. Now that the Google Docs {robots.txt} file allows search engines to index most of the public files, you should be able to find them, assuming that there are some links that point to them.

Search engines only index the files that are "public on the Web". By default, files are private, but you can {change the visibility} from the "Share" box.

Here are some useful queries that let you find public Google Drive/Docs files (you can append some keywords to the queries):

* site:docs.google.com/document/d - find text documents

* site:docs.google.com/presentation/d - find presentations

* site:docs.google.com/drawings/d - find drawings

* site:docs.google.com/file/d - find files: images, videos, PDF files, Microsoft Office documents and more (you should click "repeat the search with the omitted results included" since there are many files with similar titles)

* site:docs.google.com/folder/d - find folders (collections of files and other folders)

* site:docs.google.com/open - find other documents, folders and files (the links redirect to other URLs)

Public spreadsheets and forms can't be indexed by search engines.

Search On Google.com Without Language Redirections

Traveling abroad can become frustrating when you attempt a search on Google.com and discover you are redirected to the local countries variant.

The solution is simple enough: use the alternate NCR Google URL.

http://google.com/ncr  - always goes to Google.com

NCR stands for “No Country Redirect” and will always display Google.com in English.

Google Search Tips

SEO-oriented Operators

allintitle:
Search for documents with the given words in their title.
allintitle:travel flight will find all the documents with title containing ‘travel’ and ‘flight’. This operator cannot be combined with others.

intitle:
Search for documents with the first word after the intitle operator in their title.
intitle:travel flight will find all the documents with title containing ‘travel’ and talking about flight. Note that the word ‘flight’ is not necessarily in the title.

allintext:
Search for documents with the given words in their text.
allintext:travel flight will find all the documents with text containing ‘travel’ and ‘flight’.This operator cannot be combined with others.

intext:
Search for documents with the first word after the intext operator in their text. intext:travel flight will find all the documents with text containing ‘travel’ and talking about flight. Note that the word ‘flight’ is not necessarily in the text

allinurl:
Search for documents with the given words in their url.
allinurl:travel flight will find all the documents with url containing ‘travel’ and ‘flight’. This operator cannot be combined with others.

inurl:
Search for documents with the first word after the inurl operator in their url. inurl:travel flight will find all the documents with url containing ‘travel’ and talking about flight. Note that the word ‘flight’ is not necessarily in the text

allinanchor:
Search for documents with the given words in an anchor.
allinurl:travel flight will find all the documents with anchor text containing ‘travel’ and ‘flight’. This operator cannot be combined with others.

inanchor:
Search for documents with the first word after the operator in an anchor. inanchor:travel flight will find all the documents with anchor containing ‘travel’ and talking about flight. Note that the word ‘flight’ is not necessarily in an anchor.



Advanced google operators


filetype:
returns links to documents with the given file type.
Currently officially supported file types are pdf, ps, wk1, wk2, wk3, wk4, wk5, wki, wks, wku, lwp, mw, xls, ppt, doc, wks, wps, wdb, wri, rtf, swf, ans, txt, but other are supported as well, like xml, cpp, java etc.

site:
restricts the results to the given domain.
site:travel.info will find all indexed page on www.travel.info, while site:travel.info flights will find all flights-related pages on www.travel.info .

cache:
shows the cached version of given webpage. Other words in the query will be highlighted in the returned page, try cache:www.travel.info flight

link:
lists webpages that link to the given webpage. link:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/travel will list webpages with links pointing to wikipedia’s voice for travel

related:
returns pages that google somehow thinks are related to the given page. Not always accurate.

info:
returns some informations about the given web page. Typically website and description.