How can I find my Google search term in a PDF?

June 5, 2020 8:17 AM

Say Google finds my search term in a multi-page PDF. If the PDF is an image, I can't ctrl-f to find my search term. Any way to find it without reading the whole document or downloading it and OCR'ing it myself?
posted by Xalf to Computers & Internet (3 answers total)

I think this article says help is on the way. I cannot tell if it also is for a pdf that needs ocr.
posted by AugustWest at 9:34 AM on June 5, 2020

I think you just need to OCR it.
posted by turkeyphant at 6:15 PM on June 5, 2020

It's not always available, but if there's a little arrow next to the URL on the results page, click it and open the "Cache" link for that result. For PDF links this opens Google's searchable HTML text copy of the file with minimal formatting.
posted by Rhaomi at 1:20 AM on June 7, 2020