How to search the web for documents/books or other files?

Great advice in starpaths "My web 2.0 collection" blog.

If you want to search for a book, paper, file and your are using Google, just type:

allinurl: +(rar|chm|zip|pdf|tgz) TheTitle

and replace TheTitle with words from the title of the document. This search will find compressed (probably large) files or pdf-documents. More precisely it will search for urls that contain the file extensions associated with these documents or compressed files anywhere in the url.

Thus if you are only interested in word- or pdf-documents, you might try:

allinurl: +(pdf|doc|docx) TheTitle

The same approach does work for any type of file, you just have to put the corresponding file extension into the search string.