Google Search – How to Find Webpages Linking to a PDF

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I found an interesting PDF with my last Google research, via a direct link to it ( Google result was like "http://example.com/somefolder/interesting.pdf").

I would like to put the pdf in context, that is to say find a webpage linking to it. How can I find it? I tried to google http://example.com/somefolder/interesting.pdf, but I got only one result (of course the pdf itself). If I google "example.com/somefolder/interesting.pdf" I get no result.

Does that mean that the original pdf is an "orphan" attachment?

Is there any option in advanced search that I missed?
Maybe is there another search engine with this feature?

Best Answer

Google has a special HowTo page for you here where you will find advice how to search for a specific link - just as you've described.

Use the "link:" operator.

For example, to find pages that link to www.google.com, use [ link:google.com ]. You can also search for links to specific pages like [ link:google.com/images ].

Related Solutions

Google-search – How to customize URL search conditions on Google

It doesn't seem to be possible with Google. In the paragraph about the site operator, GoogleGuide says,

You can use many of the search operators in conjunction with the basic search operators +, –, OR, and " ".

but it doesn't seem to work for the inurl operator.

The following works for one specific site:

popcorn -site:thepopcornfactory.com

You could string together all the sites you don't want (which is how I use it), but that's hardly optimal and only works on the domain name, not the entire URL:

popcorn -site:thepopcornfactory.com -site:popcornhour.com -site:popcorn.org

As partial domain matching seems to be limited even for Google's Custom Search, I suspect that this might be a limitation of the way they keep or access their index. So above may be the only way, unless someone else knows more.

Google-search – Why does Google skip the search result

It's interesting that if you remove ~ullman from the site you get your first result returned at the very top of the search results again!

 site:http://infolab.stanford.edu/ filetype:pdf view serializability

Browsing around Professor Ullman's page, I noticed that there were no (live) direct links to the original vs-old.pdf file that was at the top of your original search. I'm guessing that if you are restricting results to Professor Ullman's section of the infolab site, there will be no results returned, whereas there are likely to be other pages in the infolab that contain links to that particular document - which results in that pdf reappearing when submitting a less restrictive search.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Google-search – How to customize URL search conditions on Google

Google-search – Why does Google skip the search result

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