I search for a lot of manuals. For some reason, most companies make it hard to find manuals for their products. They hide them behind subscriber walls or worse, just don't offer them to the public at all. I'm used to that. I'm used to having to knock down doors for manuals. I'm also used to, on occasion, lucking out and finding someone in a forum or a blog somewhere, or on their own personal server, has uploaded or hosted a PDF version of the manual I'm looking for. The little [ PDF ] prefix in the google search results used to make my heart jump a bit. It used to mean something (that what you're about to click on is a friggin PDF). Now it means nothing. I don't know when it first happened, but it quickly got worse and now it's absolutely rampant. Every. Single. Link. ALL BOGUS. WHY?! WHHHYYYY?! Why on earth would google take what was a useful feature that they went out of their way to create, and adulterate it into a tool for spammers/phishermen? Someone needs to be fired.

 

Hello,

That is one of the reasons I am using Yahoo as search engine.
The advanced seach page has a lot of options:
https://search.yahoo.com/web/advanced?ei=UTF-8&fr=altavista&p=

Bertus

 

Google is staring to do that too. You click on a site that says they have a PDF and you go to a generic site that wants information. I put it down to a phishing type thing, and close it immediately.

 

@strantor that line takes you directly to that manual. Manual with those tags have table of contents. www.w3.org has all the minutia you'd ever want to read about web standards.