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To index the documents, the indexing service use filters for specific file types. Microsoft includes many of these filters with the basic installation (Word, Excel, ...) but there is no filter installed by default for indexing PDF files. The consequence is that none of PDF documents is indexed so it is impossible to do research on those.

The first thing to do is download the PDF iFilter which is provided for free by Adobe. The 64-bit version is available at this URL: http://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/detail.jsp?ftpID=4025:

The next step is to reference the file type in the search service. Open the SharePoint Central Administration and click the Manage Service applications link under the Application Management section on the homepage. In the Services list, locate and click the Search Service Application. In the new page that opens, click the File Types link in the left menu under the Crawling section. This takes you to the page where you can specify file types to include in the index:

Click on the link New File Type at the top of the list, enter pdf in the File Name Extension field and submit the form.

To achieve the configuration, open the Registry Editor by typing regedit from the Start menu then Run... on the server. Go to the key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office Server\14.0\Search\Setup\Filters, open the context menu of this key and click New then Key and enter the value .pdf:

Create 3 new values in this key more than the default that already exists (Default):

Then go to the key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office Server\14.0\Search\Setup\ContentIndexCommon\Filters\Extension and create a new key as above and named .pdf.

Change the value (Default) which is empty by {E8978DA6-047F-4E3D-9C78-CDBE46041603}:

This GUID is the CLSID of the Adobe PDF iFilter.

Restart now the search service with the following commands:

net stop osearch14

net start osearch14

You just have to restart full indexing to index PDF documents.