Supported file types for text extraction

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.
  • Right-to-left-written documents, such as Hebrew.