Search Across PDFs
Search many PDFs at once for a word or phrase.
How to use Search Across PDFs
- 01
Add your PDFs
Drop in as many PDFs as you like — contracts, statements, research papers, a whole folder's worth. They're indexed as you add them.
- 02
Type what you're looking for
Enter a word or phrase. Results appear instantly, grouped by file, with each match highlighted in context.
- 03
Jump to the page
Click any result's page number to see that exact page rendered, so you can read the match in place.
Tested and last verified on
About Search Across PDFs
Drop in a whole set of PDFs and search across all of them at once for a word or phrase. Every match is listed with its file, page number and a highlighted snippet, and you can open any page to see it. The PDFs are indexed and searched entirely in your browser — nothing is uploaded.
Find the needle without opening every haystack
Anyone who works with documents eventually faces the same problem: the answer is somewhere in a pile of PDFs, but which one? Which contract mentions the termination clause, which bank statement has that transaction, which of last year's reports referenced a particular figure, which research paper used a specific term. Opening each file and pressing Ctrl+F, one after another, is tedious and easy to get wrong — miss one file and you miss the answer. There is no built-in way to search across a whole set of PDFs at once.
This tool provides exactly that. Drop in as many PDFs as you need, type a word or phrase, and it searches every page of every document simultaneously. Each match is listed with its file name, its page number, and a snippet of the surrounding text with your search term highlighted, so you can see the context at a glance and go straight to what you were looking for.
A real index, built privately in your browser
When you add PDFs, the tool reads the text layer of every page and builds a search index in memory — the same idea a desktop search program uses, but running entirely on your own device. Searching that index is effectively instant, and results update as you type. Matches are grouped by file and ordered by page, and each result shows how many times the term appears on that page, so you can tell a passing mention from a page that is genuinely about your query.
Crucially, none of this involves a server. Many people who need to search across documents are dealing with exactly the kind of material that should never be uploaded to a stranger's website — legal files, financial statements, medical records, private correspondence. Because the indexing and searching happen locally, you can search a folder of sensitive contracts with the same confidence you would have searching files on your own hard drive. Nothing is transmitted, stored remotely, or logged.
See the match in place, and know its limits
Finding a match is only half the job; you usually want to read it in context. Clicking a result's page number renders that exact page as an image, so you can see the match sitting in the real document layout rather than just as a text snippet. That makes it easy to verify you have found the right thing before you act on it.
The one requirement is that the PDFs contain actual text. Documents created digitally — exported reports, generated statements, typed contracts — carry a text layer that this tool can read. A scanned document that is really just a photograph of a page has no text to index, so it will not turn up results until you add a text layer with the OCR tool first. For everything else, this turns a disorganised heap of PDFs into something you can actually search, in seconds, without giving up an ounce of privacy.
Questions
Everything runs in your browser. How we keep files private
Why not just open each PDF and use Ctrl+F?
Ctrl+F only searches one open document at a time. When you have ten, twenty, or fifty PDFs and need to find which one mentions a name, a clause, or an invoice number, opening and searching each by hand is slow and error-prone. This tool searches all of them at once and tells you exactly which file and page each match is on.
Does it work on scanned PDFs?
Only if the PDF has a text layer. A scanned image with no embedded text has nothing to search. Run those files through the OCR tool first to add a text layer, then index and search them here.
How many PDFs can I search?
There's no fixed limit — you can index a large batch. Because everything is held in your browser's memory, very large collections are bounded by your device's available memory, but typical sets of dozens of documents work smoothly.
Are my documents uploaded to build the index?
No. The text is extracted and the search index is built entirely in your browser. Your PDFs never leave your device, which matters when searching contracts, financial records, or other confidential files.
Part of: Getting a document accepted by a portal
Combine, shrink, straighten and convert until the upload goes through.
- Combine several documents into a single fileMix PDFs, photographs and Word files into one document in the exact order you want.
- Reduce a document below an upload limitShrinks the file while verifying the result is still readable, and tells you the size it achieved.
- Make a scanned document searchableAdds a real text layer behind the image so the content can be searched, copied and accepted.