PDF Search Reviews

Fails to index most pdf files saying that the files are invalid! Clearly that’s not the case since the same files open in other pdf readers. Not worth $10!!!

I have several items and it doesn’t keep the index and the indexing is incomplete resulting in poor search results!

Ranks or NOT in proper order.
Crashes often.
Pdf export has many pages of blurred text
No relevant data in help to solve the problems.

While you are trying to search in a book or any document that has the same word multiple times after scrolling to the next one, PDFSearch will crash. Also, if the home back hides by press screen will you read, it will be hard to bring it back again.

Can only search in predesignated or created folders....specifically got this to search in my WinZip folder, but cannot do that...knew inside of 5 minutes and requested a refund but no joy. Trying to work with it but too cumbersome for my needs.

Update to original review: To my original review I received immediate feedback from the developer addressing each of the issues I raised. In the world of iOS apps, this is exceptional. I will continue to check for updates and test PDFSearch at a later date.

Original Review:

When I click on Selected Locations, I see OneDrive (where all my thousands of PDF files are stored), but it appears to be disabled. When I click on the link, nothing happens.

Also, when I searched PDFSearch for a way to send feedback from PDFSearch , there was no intuitive way to do so (as there is in the Settings for PDF Expert, for example).

Since I can’t access OneDrive, I have no particular use for PDFSearch . PDF Expert indexes my files (although not by a single folder) and allows me to search my library (although not in the ways advertised by PDFSearch). I regret that I could not give it a better review, but without the ability to access OneDrive I could not test it against my extensive PDF library.

It’s like a personal google for your documents. I used it for school and now I use it at work. I point it at office documents and textbooks PDFs, and it gives me the results I need in one place.

Unfortunately PDFSearch is faulty. Indexing will sometimes not pick up files after repeated troubleshooting attempts. Worse, pdf viewing is buggy and you will lose your view when scrolling to the next page.

Overall PDFSearch is good. I have PDFSearch on my iPhone, iPad & Mac. I’ve used it considerably while studying for quizzes & tests.

My concern comes in where I’ve submitted a tech support question regarding whether or not “highlighting” syncs across my devices. I’ve submitted 2 requests but I’ve heard nothing in reply. I submitted my requests on their website. I’ve also got highlighting in multiple repetition. I see the word “act” & “finance” highlighted all through my doc and I didn’t initiate this.

PDFSearch itself is pretty good, just not very flexible in sorting and such.

I sent a message to their help contact and heard not one thing from them.

All-in-all, the experience with this firm and their app is middling.

Cmd + F for search (with Esc to cancel search), shortcuts for navigating through document / to other documents, etc.

Very helpful but I don’t know why can’t find words combined with numerical signs such as “C-1234”

I have many OCR'd PDF documents stored on my iPad. I can copy hundreds of documents from Good Reader into the search folder (which can have sub folders to limit scope of documents searched) of PDFSearch and index them in less than 10 minutes - we’re talking about 5 GB of data! Searching is incredibly fast - in many cases almost instantaneous.

Fast indexing and search of multiple .pdf files tool. I use the tool to perform multiple document searches on my iPad. Great to provide suggestions as I start to enter search terms. Easy to import files using iOS 11 document tool. Overall meeting my needs.

PDFSearch is excellent overall, but I hope one annoying issue can be fixed. When I connect my Google Drive to PDFSearch , it downloads all of my PDFs and other documents and indexes them locally. I have a lot of files, and when it downloads and indexes them simultaneously, PDFSearch crashes constantly. It's really inconvenient having to reopen PDFSearch again and again. I hope this issue can be fixed soon. Thanks!

Hope to see more and more AI get baked into this.

I hope the developers keep adding features because PDFSearch is amazing. I use it to search for PDF documents, such as books, and is very accurate. Specially I like the search across books series where I can just type a few words of an event or character I barely remember (from some books ago in a series) and will search and find the paragraphs with the key words typed.

I haven't seen another iOS app that will search multiple Word files at once and show you full results, but PDFSearch does. Need to see if a word is spelled consistently across different Word files? Start typing the word in and it will show you a list of words across all your chosen files that start with those letters. Now you can easily see if you have a misspelled version of that word. Choose the one you want and arrow through each instance to see them in the context of the book. It is extremely fast, thorough, and stable. I've been using for months with no problems.

My copyeditor wishlist would be:
1. Ability to find hyphenated terms. Currently if I type in counter, it won't show counter-intelligence in the list (but if I hit find, it will find it). Would be nice to see it in the list to find discrepancies at a glance.
2. Ability to search for punctuation, to help me find punctuation issues.
3. Ability to sort results in order of alphabetical files (if files are named ch 1, ch 2, etc., to find results in that order) instead of the order PDFSearch chooses. (I know PDFSearch chooses the order based on AI and how relevant the term is, which is really cool, but I just need a regular sequential order.) That said, it's still very clear which file each result is located.
4. Ability to specify "only search this EXACT spelling." For instance, I typed in "prophec" in hopes of finding "prophecy" and "prophecies" but it found several instances of "prophet," which I didn't want.

Overall, very happy I found PDFSearch. Before this, I could only do these multiple-file searches on my computer. (Other iOS apps such as the built-in Dropbox search will show you a list of results, but then you have to open each file and search again to see the full context, which is a pain.) Thanks for creating this helpful app!

I ran into problems with PDFSearch initially, as the issues were with my not knowing how to operate it correctly. The Excellent help from support team saved the day. I am now on a supersonic research speed. PDFSearch is the only one which could index search results with actual AI and index them and automatically rank them. The search results come super fast and handy. I would love to see an additional functionality of Boolean search as in devonthink. That would massacre the competition, if any. I wish developers good luck for future enhancements.