More Google search tips and tricks - Using filetype and inurl to find resumes and other documents

Posted on March 27, 2007 at 8:07 am

Here’s a quick post about how you can use Google search to find all sorts of interesting stuff such as resumes or PowerPoint presentations, etc. If you’re applying for jobs or looking to fix up your resume, but not sure what’s a good template or maybe you just want to know what other people with your same title are putting into their resumes, they you can use Google search to find these documents!

Now, you should only be using other people’s resumes for guidance purposes and not copy someone else’s resume. Copying another resume will not help you out anyway if you don’t know what you are talking about during an interview, especially if you make yourself look better than you really are and someone calls you out on it! So stick to using it for seeing how others word their tasks and layout their resumes.

Ok so now to the fun part, searching for resumes:

In order to find resumes in Google, you’ll need to learn about two trusty little options you can use when searching: filetype and inurl. Most people save their resumes as Word docs or PDF’s and so we want to restrict our search only to those two types of documents in order to not get thousands and thousands of links.To do this, go to Google and in the search box type “filetype:doc” without the quotes. Make sure not to put a space between anything, otherwise Google will not recognize it. Now that we have filtered our search down to only Word docs, we’ll need to search for only Word docs with the word “resume” in the name of the Word file. To do this, you need to type “inurl:resume” after the filetype:doc part. Your query should look like “filetype:doc inurl:resume” as of now. Remember, inurl only looks at the actual link itself, such as http://www.microsoft.com/docs/resume.doc and doesn’t actually look at what is in the document itself, which is what you want to do or else you’ll get too many results. We’ll search the actual document itself for the specific position you are looking for.

But this search will still get you ALL resumes, so to filter it down even further you need to type in the position. For example, I wanted to search for Business Analyst resumes, so my query looked like this:

filetype:doc inurl:resume business analyst

I got 987 results with the first result coming from a Morgan Stanely Software Business Analyst! Now you can see what you need to be doing if you wanted to have any chance of working there!

filetype:doc inurl:resume web designer

This search will get you 38,000+ resumes, which is way too many! And the reason why is because the words “web” and “designer” is being searched separately and if it finds either one anywhere in the Word doc, it’ll show that as an option. I get exactly what you want, put the word in quotes as shown:

filetype:doc inurl:resume “web designer”

And now you got about 1,300 resumes! You can keep putting more filters depending on your exact role, such as “web desinger II”, which gives you only two resumes!!

You should also make sure you use filetype:pdf because there are lots of people who have their resumes posted in PDF format.

But this is not only great for resumes, let’s say you need to give a PowerPoint presentation on secure wireless networks and you’d like to see what others have done to get an idea of how to structure yours, then you can do this query:

filetype:ppt inurl:secure wireless - about 80 results

OR

filetype:ppt secure wireless - about 80,000 results

So you can see how you can narrow or widen your results by looking for the specific text within the URL or anywhere in the title and content of the document.

Hope this helps and pleas don’t copy things from other’s work! Use it only for guidance!

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» Filed Under Google Software/Tips

One Response to “More Google search tips and tricks - Using filetype and inurl to find resumes and other documents”

Yordan Georgiev said on : April 11th, 2007 at 12:46 pm

Thanks for the inurl: tip . I am using Opera with Ctrl + T , typing g filetype:ppt “text to find” inurl:toSEarch after displaying the results,
Ctrl + J, sorting the addresses, selecting all the files , right click and A, to save them all in the C:\temp folder….
it is fast , but could be better to do it all with wget or curl…