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

rthrech's avatar
rthrech
Helpful | Level 6
4 years ago

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:  ...
Desktop
File access
View
Web
  • rhut's avatar
    rhut
    2 years ago
    Hi Dropbox community!  I'm a product manager at Dropbox working on the search experience on dropbox.com.
     
    We took your feedback to heart and are happy to announce that we're adding a few new operators to help you retrieve your files/folders more quickly:
    • title:(new lead) => See results with only the specific words in title of the file
    • title:"new lead" => See results with exact phrase match in title of the file.  Note that quotes only work with title searches and can't be used to match on content
    • type:image => Filter results by a certain types like image, video, document, spreadsheet, etc.
    • type:jpg => Filter results by a certain types like file extension like jpg, png, docx, etc.
    • before:2022-01-01 => Allows you to see all content before a certain date.  Uses YYYY-MM-DD format.
    • after:2022-01-01 => Allows you to see all content after a certain date.  Uses YYYY-MM-DD format.
    • lead AND new => AND operators will show results that contain both words.
    • lead OR new =>  OR operators will show results that contain either words.

    To use these operators, login to Dropbox.com, click on the searchbox at the top, and start typing your query.  You can learn more about our operators on our help center article here:  https://help.dropbox.com/view-edit/search

     

    Note that there are some limitations:

      - This feature is Web only (for now)

      - Searches may return inaccurate results for contents of a file, certain images, and Paper docs if you're using the old release of Dropbox Paper.

      - Quotes will only work on file titles, not matches on content (for now)

     

    Try it out and let us know what you think!

     

    Thanks for your patience as we ship new features to improve your overall Dropbox experience!

     

    Rhut

Marco R.11's avatar
Marco R.11
New member | Level 2

Can you please confirm, that text phrase search does not work on Dropbox? 

The entire product is useless without text phrase search

Hannah's avatar
Hannah
Icon for Dropbox Staff rankDropbox Staff
2 years ago

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.

  • FrankGaz's avatar
    FrankGaz
    Helpful | Level 7
    2 years ago

    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.

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