Have you ever needed to find a specific piece of information buried somewhere in one of dozens of PDF files, but couldn’t remember which file it was in? Searching through each PDF one-by-one can be incredibly time consuming and frustrating. Luckily, there are ways to easily search the text of multiple PDF files at the same time, right from your web browser or PDF reader application.
In this guide, we’ll walk through the simple steps to search multiple PDFs online, so you can quickly find that quote, statistic or key piece of information without the hassle. Whether you’re a student trying to locate info for a research paper or a professional looking for a detail in a stack of reports, these techniques will save you valuable time and effort.
1. Using Your Web Browser to Search PDFs
One of the easiest ways to search multiple PDFs is by using the built-in search features of your web browser, such as Google Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Microsoft Edge. Here’s how:
- Open the PDF in your web browser. Instead of downloading the PDF, open it directly in a browser tab. You can usually do this by right-clicking the PDF link and selecting Open in new tab.
- Use the Find command. Press Ctrl+F (Windows) or Cmd+F (Mac) to open the Find search bar in your browser. You can also access Find in the browser’s menu.
- Enter your search terms. Type the word or phrase you want to find into the search box. The matching terms will be highlighted in the document.
- Navigate the results. Use the up/down arrows next to the search box to jump to each instance of the search term in the PDF. Close the search bar when finished.
This method works well if you only need to search a couple PDFs. But if you have many files to look through, using a dedicated PDF reader application is more efficient.
2. Searching PDFs with Adobe Acrobat Reader
Adobe Acrobat Reader is the most popular free PDF reader. It has robust search capabilities that allow you to search multiple PDF files at once. Follow these steps:
- Open Adobe Acrobat Reader. Launch the application on your computer.
- Access the Search window. Click Edit > Advanced Search in the menu bar. Or in newer versions, click the Search icon in the toolbar.
- Choose where to search. In the Search window, next to Look In, click the dropdown and select All PDF Documents in… then choose the folder on your computer containing the PDFs you want to search.
- Enter search terms. Type the word or phrase to find in the “What word or phrase would you like to search for?” box. You can enter multiple terms separated by spaces.
- Set search options. Click Show More Options to reveal advanced settings like whole words only, case-sensitive, include bookmarks, etc. Choose the options you need.
- Run the search. Click the Search button. Acrobat will display a list of all PDF files with matching terms, with a preview of the text around each match.
- Review results. Click on a result to open that PDF to the correct page. Use the Next/Previous buttons to jump between all the matches within a single PDF.
Using Acrobat’s Advanced Search is the most comprehensive way to search the full text of many PDFs in a directory. It even searches PDF bookmarks, comments and file metadata.
3. Other PDF Search Tools
In addition to Acrobat, there are other free and commercial PDF readers that support multi-file search, such as:
- Foxit Reader – offers advanced search features similar to Acrobat
- Slim PDF – a minimalist PDF reader with a quick multi-file search function
- PDF Search – a dedicated desktop search utility for PDFs
There are also online PDF search services like Swiftype that can index and search PDFs hosted on your website or cloud storage platforms like Dropbox, Google Drive and OneDrive.
Conclusion
With the massive amount of information stored in PDF format, being able to quickly search through multiple files is an essential skill. By using your web browser’s built-in Find tool, Adobe Acrobat’s Advanced Search, or other PDF search utilities, you can instantly locate key information across all your PDF documents.
No more wasting time opening files one-by-one or visually scanning pages. With these PDF search techniques at your fingertips, you’ll be able to find what you need in seconds. Try them out the next time you’re working with PDFs and see how much time you can save!
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