You might see that the Dropbox Community team have been busy working on some major updates to the Community itself! So, here is some info on what’s changed, what’s staying the same and what you can expect from the Dropbox Community overall.
Forum Discussion
Advanced search based on key phrases
I seriously need advanced searching.
Dropbox used to have these features (like search exact phrase) in 2015, but somehow removed them. So how can I do advanced searching in dropbox? Like:
...
That link doesn’t work.
Ah sorry, see "Advanced search operators" under this HC article! https://help.dropbox.com/view-edit/search
Thank you for reaching out and updating us!
Hello Rhut,
It doesn't seem as though the new operators do much to help Dropbox search. Without the ability to search for exact phrases within a document, I don't see how any of this helps solve any of the problems that we've been talking about.
1. DATES - It's a nice feature, but is only a small step up from sorting and scrolling.
2 DOC TITLES - This is only a moderate step-up from sorting a folder and scrolling (which may actually be faster). Also, the documentation says
"Note: The document title may not be the same as the folder or file name". If the "title" I can search for may not be the file name, then I don't see how any user can reliably use the "TITLE" operator to find any specific document.
3. AND / OR - These are borderline useless, as DB currently ignores word order. So any given search using AND/OR is likely to return countless numbers of documents that are unrelated to what a user is looking for.
The only way these operators become useful is to also add the exact phrases.
Are there plans to add searches for exact phrases? Or is it still a situation in which we'd all be better just switching to another service?
Hi all,
It is now March 2024 and it seems exact phrase search for document content is still not working? Can you please give an indication when this will be addressed?
Kind regards,
Koen
Ps: we have been Pro customer for over 10 years with a group of about 10...
Can you please confirm, that text phrase search does not work on Dropbox?
The entire product is useless without text phrase search
- Hannah
Dropbox Staff
Hey Marco R.11, can you please give us some more info as to why the feature is not working for you?
Are you seeing some kind of error message, or do you get no results when searching for key words in your files?
Any additional info would be helpful.
Great feedback! Responding to each of your points:
1. Date: This feature can help more in situations where you'd be looking for files across folders, but agree that sorting and scrolling could work equally well within a folder.
2. Title: So we heard from users who had access to image search, full-text search, and OCR wanted the ability to isolate searches to title only. Again, may be more helpful in situations where you're looking for files across folders. You can do exact phrase matches on titles, so "q1 quarterly report". or title:"q1 quarterly report". We can update that help center article -- you'll be searching for the file/folder title and will match on that. That point was meant more that metadata with "title:" won't match using the title operator.
3. Fair point on the AND/OR w/o exact phrase match.
I agree this isn't a perfect end state, but wanted to start here and continue iterating on the feature set! Exact phrase match is definitely on our backlog and requires a larger change on the backend, and I can provide an update as we get closer to launch.
