Web Search by Extention

Try entering the filetype: parameter in your google searches

Example:

"Experts Exchange" filetype:pdf

will only return pdf documents including phrase "Experts Exchange"


Hope this helps

yes but I'm not looking for documents or comments. Only actual files with a specific extension. Ideally, it would return a list of files and provide the option for the user to select which files to download.

The only thing you will be able to search is web pages and all you can find will be links.  Will the files you are looking for be found as links in web pages?

Hmmm. Good question. I'm not sure. Have to think about that one.

I'm thinking yes, the ones I'm interested in would be links. Problem is, I only want files returned in the search. Nothing else. No documents or text, etc.

A document is a file. And an extension does not determine file type; it's just a part of the name chosen by its creator. (The adherence to any naming standard is by choice, not by any requirement. Files that have non-standard extensions are often risky to access. And you'd choose to download them to your system?)

How are you expecting your hypothetical utility to do its searching? You should understand that it will never run long enough to finish unless you have a way to tell it a very limited list of sites to search, and it likely won't have access to enough storage to store its results if it isn't directed.

Tom

Tom: You're probably correct in all cases. My primary interest is *.STL files, used with 3-D printers, of which there aren't that many as of yet. Of course, that will change over time. I just thought a utility that would search the net for these files would provide the user what amounts to blue prints of 3-D files already available to print.

Thanks. I'll play with this for awhile.