Searchengine Taste Test: PDF Geni

Posted by Jim Stroud

August 16, 2008

I stumbled across a new searchengine that I thought I would share with you guys. Its brand spanking new, so everything is not working with it. Still, what I saw was good enough to bring to your attention (so I did). The searchengine is called PDF Geni.

PDF Geni

From what I can tell, its designed as a means to find ebooks online that are in PDF format. Simply type in keywords and PDF Genie will bring back search results of PDF ebooks. As soon as I saw that I thought, “Hmm… I wonder if I can use this to find resumes in PDF format.”

So I gave it a try. I added the keywords “C++ java atlanta programmer resume” (as shown below).

PDF Geni

And these are the results.

PDF Geni

I click on the preview icon (shown by the arrow below) and I am able to preview the PDF before I download it.

PDF Geni

Here is a sample of what the preview looks like.
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PDF Geni

Nice! At first I was overly excited because this was working so well, then I noticed that PDF Genie was powered by Google. Was searching PDF Genie with the keywords cited above any different than searching Google using the following string?

C++ java atlanta programmer intitle:resume filetype:pdf

I looked through the results and compared the Google search results to PDF Genie’s search results and found no overlapping results. Well, I did not go through all of the results admittedly, but I did go through several of the PDF Genie results and did not find them among the 30 or so results (at this writing) that Google gave me. That being the case, the smile I had before returned to my face.

RECOMMENDATION: Add to your bag of tricks.