My client is trying to use SQL Server Full Text Search to search PDFs stored
in a varbinary(max) column. Full text search works fine for other Microsoft
Office documents stored in the same table but it does NOT give back any
results from the PDF documents.

Following is a high-level view of what the client did:

1. Installed Adobe PDF IFilter 6.0
2. Ran the stored procedure sp_fulltext_service (as documented)
3. Restarted the server
4. Verified that the filter got properly installed by querying the system
view
   sys.fulltext_document_types
5. Created a full text index on the table with the documents
6. Started a full population of the index
7. Ran a sample query with a string he knows is in the PDF file like the
following:
   select * from documents where freetext(document, ‘Review’) and got no
results
   back
8. Ran the same sample query with a string he knows is in some Word files
like the
   following: select * from documents where freetext(document, ‘SQL’) the
query
   returned several rows back as expected.

Does anybody know what might be happening here?

Thank you!

Camilo Leon