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Cloud Search indexes all items that are sent, regardless of file type
(MIME or content-type). Indexing is performed on a file's metadata data and,
if supported, its content. Following is a list of file types for which content
indexing is supported.
Microsoft Word (DOC)
Microsoft Word (DOCX)
Microsoft Excel (XLS)
Microsoft Excel (XLSX)
Microsoft Powerpoint (PPT)
Microsoft Powerpoint (PPTX)
Adobe’s Portable Document Format (PDF)
Rich Text Format (RTF)
Text Format (TXT)
Hypertext Markup Language (HTML)
Extensible Markup Language (XML)
In addition to these file types, Cloud Search supports indexing of content
within any plain text file.
Optical Character Recognition (OCR) file types and characteristics
Google Cloud Search also uses OCR to extract text from the following file types:
File type
Maximum size
Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPG)
10 MB
Graphic Interchange Format (GIF)
10 MB
Tagged Image File Format (TIFF)
10 MB
Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG)
10 MB
PostScript Image Format (PS)
10 MB
Portable Document Format (PDF)
30 MB
OCR also works on files with these characteristics:
Hand-written documents. Documents in Latin script, Japanese, and Korean yield
the best results.
Vertically-written documents, such as those in Japanese.
[[["Easy to understand","easyToUnderstand","thumb-up"],["Solved my problem","solvedMyProblem","thumb-up"],["Other","otherUp","thumb-up"]],[["Missing the information I need","missingTheInformationINeed","thumb-down"],["Too complicated / too many steps","tooComplicatedTooManySteps","thumb-down"],["Out of date","outOfDate","thumb-down"],["Samples / code issue","samplesCodeIssue","thumb-down"],["Other","otherDown","thumb-down"]],["Last updated 2025-08-04 UTC."],[],[],null,["# Supported file types for text extraction\n\nCloud Search indexes all items that are sent, regardless of file type\n(MIME or content-type). Indexing is performed on a file's metadata data and,\nif supported, its content. Following is a list of file types for which content\nindexing *is* supported.\n\n- Microsoft Word (DOC)\n- Microsoft Word (DOCX)\n- Microsoft Excel (XLS)\n- Microsoft Excel (XLSX)\n- Microsoft Powerpoint (PPT)\n- Microsoft Powerpoint (PPTX)\n- Adobe's Portable Document Format (PDF)\n- Rich Text Format (RTF)\n- Text Format (TXT)\n- Hypertext Markup Language (HTML)\n- Extensible Markup Language (XML)\n\nIn addition to these file types, Cloud Search supports indexing of content\nwithin any plain text file.\n\nOptical Character Recognition (OCR) file types and characteristics\n------------------------------------------------------------------\n\nGoogle Cloud Search also uses OCR to extract text from the following file types:\n\n| File type | Maximum size |\n|----------------------------------------|--------------|\n| Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPG) | 10 MB |\n| Graphic Interchange Format (GIF) | 10 MB |\n| Tagged Image File Format (TIFF) | 10 MB |\n| Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) | 10 MB |\n| PostScript Image Format (PS) | 10 MB |\n| Portable Document Format (PDF) | 30 MB |\n\n| **Note:** Cloud Search uses OCR for PDF files only when indexing in `ASYNCHRONOUS` mode, and applies OCR to the first 80 pages of the PDF file. To be eligible for OCR, the [`ItemMetadata.mimeType`](/workspace/cloud-search/docs/reference/rest/v1/indexing.datasources.items#ItemMetadata) for the item must be specified as `application/pdf` and a PDF file must contain only scanned images. If the PDF file contains any native text content, Cloud Search indexes the native content and does not apply OCR to images.\n\nOCR also works on files with these characteristics:\n\n- Hand-written documents. Documents in Latin script, Japanese, and Korean yield the best results.\n- Vertically-written documents, such as those in Japanese.\n- Right-to-left-written documents, such as Hebrew."]]
