Search a PDF
Find every place a word, a phrase or a pattern appears, and where on the page it is.
Drop files here
Or paste them, or pick them from this device. Nothing is uploaded: the work happens in this tab.
Files in this tab
Nothing is loaded yet.
Options
The words to look for.
'query' is required.
Which pages to search.
Search the file
Add a file to get started.
What this does
This finds every place a word, a phrase or a regular expression appears, and says which page it was on and the rectangle it occupied — the same rectangle a reader highlights. It is what you want when you need to know whether a term appears at all in a thousand pages, and it is what redaction uses to find the text it removes.
What it will not do
Every tool here says what it cannot do, in its own words, before you rely on it.
- A scanned page holds a picture of words, and nothing here can read it. Run OCR over it first.
- A rectangle is worked out by counting characters across the run that holds them, which is how every reader highlights a result: it is right to within a letter, not to the glyph.
- A phrase is found across a line break, because the break is not part of what was written. It is not found across a page break.
Questions people ask
Can I search with a pattern rather than a word?
Yes. Turn on the regular expression option and the term is treated as one, which is how you find every account number or every date rather than every instance of one.
It found nothing in my scanned document.
A scan holds a picture of words, and there is nothing there to search. Run Make a scan searchable first.
Is my file uploaded anywhere?
No. The work happens in this browser tab, on your own machine. There is no server in this product to send a file to, which is why the promise is checkable rather than something you have to take on trust: open your browser's network panel and watch it do the work without making a request.
Is there a size limit, or a limit on how many files?
None that we impose. The limit is your own machine's memory, because that is where the work happens — a few hundred megabytes is comfortable on a laptop, and less on a phone. There is no daily task counter, no queue and no account.
What does it cost, and what is the catch?
Nothing, and there is no paid tier that unlocks features: the whole product is the free one. That is affordable because running it costs us nothing — your computer does the work — so there is no per-file cost to recover, no advertising and no data to sell.