We're making changes to the Community, so you may have received some notifications - thanks for your patience and welcome back. Learn more here.
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:
...
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?
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.
Hello,
I suspect that Marco is asking about this because searching for exact phrases does not work in Dropbox, which does, in fact, render Dropbox' search function 100% useless. Searching for "The document I want" returns every result with "the" and "document" and "I" and "want." Dropbox' search functionality is a bit of a scam. DB advertises full text search despite the fact that they do not provide the ability to search for an exact phrase, which renders their "full text search" completely useless.
