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Is there any feature in Google Drive to search for files and folders shared publicly by other users? I have uploaded some e-books online and I need to know how the public users can access them without knowing the link. Can they find them from search engines?
How the files shared under this link can be found by public? https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B1vcMoNJRP1-MUwzVWhnZ0E0a2M&usp=sharing
Google Drive does not offer the option to search for other users' public documents (see here).
However, it is possible for users to find these documents via Google Search using a filter. In order to search exclusively for public Google documents, a user would have to search using the following:
site:docs.google.com/document/d [keyword]
To create a tool that would allow users to search for these documents, you might consider simply creating an HTML form that submits to google with the site:docs.google.com/document/d prepended.
Here's a quick demo of that using AngularJS:
https://github.com/cweems/Google-Docs-Search/tree/cc00038e67d6d3ff15ae19a271f0bfec99437b41
Navigate to the 'app' folder and then open index.html in your browser. Enter keywords into the text box and click submit: it will return a list of results that are only Google Docs.
Try this in Google search engine:
site:drive.google.com [keyword]
Or: site:docs.google.com/document [keyword] site:docs.google.com/spreadsheet [keyword]
You will need to create API keys for Google Drive and then use them to create a searchable interface like collections in SearchBlox. After you set it up, then periodically index the files for search. http://www.searchblox.com/search-google-drive-part-intranet-website-search
