Add keyword to PDF titles to allow filtering out of Google Drive Search

One problem I have with PaperPile is actually a problem with Google Drive. Right now Google Drive does not allow one to filter out specific folders (such as the PaperPile folder) from one’s search results. I was wondering if there was some way to add a #PP tag or something to all PDF titles so that when one search’s Google Drive one could either filter out those results or restrict one’s search to PaperPile? One can restrict by kind, but I have a lot of non-Paperpile PDFs in my Drive which is why I have this problem… I now have so many PDFs in Paperpile, that they clog up my search results!

Perhaps there is another solution that is possible?

We will add full-text search into Paperpile which will allow you to search your PDFs Google Drive right from Paperpile.

So I hope with that feature this problem will be solved.

This feature is relatively close to be ready for release. However, it will take more time to test and we’re announcing other big beta tests this week. So it will have to wait in line until we can release it.

But the following post contains a screenshot of how it might look:

Ah, that solves half the problem, but actually what sparked this particular post was the opposite issue: I want to filter out Paperpile results when searching Google Drive! Let’s say I have 1000 PDFs in PaperPile (actually I have more than twice that…) and I am looking for a PDF in my drive, all those PaperPile PDFs often overwhelm my search results, making it hard for me to find what I am looking for. Unfortunately there is no way to exclude them based on folder, so I thought perhaps there might be some other way to exclude them? Basically, having PaperPile store my PDFs on Google makes it hard to find non-article PDFs on Google Drive.

Sorry, sometimes it can be challenging to keep up with all things here in the forum and I did not read your post properly.

So forget my answer which is the answer for the opposite question which has come up quite a bit.

I can’t say much to filtering out Paperpile results. I’ve to check the advanced search myself first to see if it’s even theoretically possible to do that.

Unfortunately, I am pretty sure it is not possible to restrict search to specific folders from searches on Google Drive (or exclude specific folders). To me this sounds more like a feature request to the Google Drive team (which is WAY less responsive than Paperpile developers, even for paid subscribers!).

I’ve had a look into it and it might be possible for us to add arbitrary metadata through the API and mark items from being from Paperpile. Then you could exclude items with “-paperpile” in the search. I’ve not tested it in practice though and it’s not really a trivial thing to do so we won’t be able to jump on this anytime soon.

@Andrey, you’re right it’s something Google Drive could address more easily by allowing searches by folder. But you are also right that it’s almost impossible to discuss feature request with their team. I guess that’s a matter of scale, they serve tens or hundreds of millions of users.

Our user base is a few orders of magnitudes smaller but even we now count 298 feature requests here on the forum of which only a fraction can ever be part of the product. It’s definitely a challenge.

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