Full text search in PDFs

I am having this problem as well, and find it very cumbersome to search for text or phrases within my google drive with so many other unrelated documents/pdfs/note pages popping up in my searches.

The main complaints I’ve heard from those who I tried to convert to PaperPile are: (1) Word integration, and (2) Searchable text. Essentially, those are the two main features available on other ref managers that they really can’t go without.

I know that a plugin is in the works for MS Word integration, but a full text search integrated into paperpile would really go a long way to courting more users (at least in my experience).

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We have implemented most of PDF full text search already. It’s in the release pipeline but it has to wait after the Word plugin and Mobile betas are released next month.

Interestingly, our user data is quite different from your experience. While the Word plugin is indeed a showstopper for many, PDF search hardly ever comes up as a requested feature or is cited as a showstopper.

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Wow, that looks really great! Thanks for the preview, very exciting. I will admit, my pool of user feedback is most likely far smaller than yours hah. Nonetheless, thank you for including this. Can’t wait to see everything in the release next month.

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Wahoo!! Word implementation AND searchable in pdfs…
oh hang on… next month… but my PhD will (please god) be done by then… :confounded:

bugger! oh well it’ll come in handy for the post doc.

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Great - this should be super useful. On machines where I have my Google Drive sync’d I can of course use desktop full search, but for machines when I’m mainly working from a web browser full-text search from the app would be invaluable!

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+1 for full text PDF search.

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Any word on this, guys?

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Not at this time. We will announce it once it’s available.

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Just adding my 2 cents; the lack of PDF text search really is a showstopper for me. In particular, I would like to clarify that both the lack of full text search and having to switch to the “basic” PDF viewer every time I want to search through a document is irritating. I understand that this is not something the broader userbase is clamoring for, but I figured I should make my opinion known in that case! Excited to see that it might be coming soon, as this is the one thing that will make me hesitate in renewing my otherwise fantastic Paperpile subscription.

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I completely agree with you on the importance of full text search, but for searching the content of the individual PDFs you should be able to use MetaPDF, not just the basic viewer. Does that not work for you?

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I agree that full-text search would be useful, but I’d also add that it will be important to keep the option of not searching the full text sometimes. For example, I often open Paperpile and type an author’s name into the search box in order to get a list of that author’s papers. If the search automatically included the full text of PDFs, then the search results would include all papers that refer to that author - which would often be much less useful.

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Yes, you are right, that’s one reason why we will keep the full-text search separate.

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I guess this is redundant now, but +1 for (optional) full text search. This is currently one of the reasons I still switch back to Zotero - my library is too large, and my memory too poor, to always find results by title or author, and doing such searches globally is useful to ensure I’m not relying on my filing of papers! I’m looking forward to this feature, and being able to fully switch to Paperpile!

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Same for me. Not being able to search PDFs and annotate/highlight them is a major problem. look forward to see a swift resolution

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+1 for me too, the only reason preventing me to switch from Qiqqa, which has the best context search (plus text analysis like connectivity graph as a bonus) of all competitors. Context search (think google-like results showing surrounding area of the matches) of my library would be the ultimate tool. Thanks!

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Agree. Full text search is critical. And not too hard to implement

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This is a big feature for me (second only to offline mode). I have many references in my library that only have one or two paragraphs that are relevant to me so full-text search is key to finding them. Abstract + title will often miss this information.

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I would absolutely love to see this. I’m doing the trial now, and I can’t see me sticking with it without this feature.

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Sorry about the slow response - I just wanted to give credit where it is due, as you are entirely correct regarding the single-PDF search Andrey. Thank you for the tip!

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+1 for text search of PDFs. This is a very important feature for me.

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