How to search public Google Drive files and folders

Google Drive has a search box, but it only looks inside your own Drive and the files people shared with you. Millions of other files are public: their owners set them to "Anyone with the link", and once that link appears on a web page, search engines can index it. This guide shows how to find those files, how to narrow the results to folders, Docs or Sheets, and what to check before you open what you find.

What counts as a public Google Drive file

Every file and folder on Drive has a "General access" setting:

• Restricted: only the people added by email can open it.
• Anyone with the link: whoever has the URL can open it, without signing in.
• Published to the web: Docs, Sheets and Slides can also be published as a web page, meant to be read by anyone.

Google does not list link-shared files anywhere on its own. A file becomes searchable when its link is posted somewhere public, such as a forum, a course page or a blog, and a search engine crawls it. So the part of Drive you can search is the part that has been linked from the open web.

Method 1: search with dedigger

dedigger is a search engine for public Google Drive files. It works like any search box, with a few extras for files:

1. Type your keywords, for example project management plan.
2. Pick a filter: PDF, or Docs/Sheets for Word, Excel and PowerPoint files.
3. Switch the sort to Newest to favour files from the last 12 months.
4. Use Cards to see thumbnails or List to scan many results quickly. Copy all results copies every link on the page at once, and Share this search gives you a link to the same results.

For common needs there are ready-made searches: resume and CV templates, Excel and Word templates, public datasets in CSV, syllabi and study guides and business plan templates.

Method 2: Google search operators

You can also search Google directly with the site: operator, which limits results to one website or one part of it. Type these into Google:

• Any public Drive file: site:drive.google.com budget template
• Shared folders: site:drive.google.com/drive/folders photography
• Google Docs: site:docs.google.com/document lesson plan
• Google Sheets: site:docs.google.com/spreadsheets inventory
• Google Slides: site:docs.google.com/presentation pitch deck
• PDFs only: site:drive.google.com filetype:pdf user manual

Combine them with the usual operators: quotes for an exact phrase ("annual report"), a minus sign to leave out a word (-sample), OR for alternatives (resume OR cv) and intext: to require a word in the body of the document.

Google's results page was not built for files, though: you get one link per file, with no file-type filter and no thumbnails. dedigger runs the same kind of search and adds those.

Why some files don't show up

• The file is restricted. Only the people invited by email can open it, so no search engine sees it.
• Nobody linked it publicly. A link-shared file that was only sent by email or chat stays out of search results.
• It is new. Search engines need time to find a link and index it.
• The owner changed the access or deleted it. Some results point to files that are gone; you will see an access request page instead of the file.

Before you download

• Public is not the same as free to reuse. The file still belongs to its owner. Check its license, or ask, before you republish it.
• Prefer documents to programs. PDFs, Docs and Sheets open in Google's viewer without downloading anything. Be wary of executables and archives from owners you don't know.
• Mind the virus-scan warning. Google Drive scans files for viruses but not very large ones, and it says so before the download. Think twice when you see that warning.
• Keep a copy of what matters. Owners can make a file private at any time. Download it, or use File > Make a copy for Docs and Sheets, and keep it in your own Drive or in another cloud such as pCloud.

Frequently asked questions

Can I search inside a public Google Drive folder?

Open the folder and use your browser's find command (Ctrl+F, or Cmd+F on a Mac) to look for a file name in the list.

Is it legal to search public Google Drive files?

Finding and opening files their owners made public is like visiting any public web page. What matters is what you do with a file afterwards: respect copyright and the owner's license.

How do I keep my own files from showing up?

Set them back to Restricted in the Share dialog. Public vs private cloud storage walks through it and covers when an encrypted cloud is worth it.