Currently it is possible to apply a filetype=PPT filter to a Google Custom Search (CS) request in order to isolate PowerPoint files. However, this does not of course include any other presentation formats, such as as OpenOffice Impress files, GoogleDocs presentations and any content from relevant fileshare sites such as SlideShare and Scribd.

Today we have been testing out both the filetype=PPT filter in Google CS and also looking at the SlideShare API to see what this offers.

One possible showstopper for Google CS is that the resulting JSON file returns no URL for a thumbnail or any other visual representation of the PowerPoint files. This is quite a problem for us, as we are aiming to present all results visually.

Although we’re still getting to grips with it, the SlideShare API certainly does return thumbnail URLs that we can use in our results. We’ll continue to explore this and hopefully post a test page in the near future.