Search & Full Text Search

Introduction

ownCloud comes with a regular search function allowing you to find files by their file name or parts of their names. Click on the magnifier icon in the upper right-hand corner of the web interface. In addition, a Full Text Search app can be enabled by your administrator. Refer to the Full Text Search app in the ownCloud Admin Manual for more information about how to deploy it.

The regular search function provided as base functionality in the ownCloud web interface offers a simple search for file names only. Note that no file content will be part of any search result.

  • Search is not case-sensitive, capital letters are treated the same as lower case characters. You can type Spain or spain and will get the same results.

  • When you start typing, search also starts.

  • The search term is taken as it is and not interpreted to refine search results.

  • When entering the pattern to search for, you get results for any filenames that contain that pattern.

  • When starting at the top level of your files, which is "All files", you will also see results in subfolders.

  • When changing into a directory, search starts in this folder, displays the results, and continues to search in subsequent folders.

  • A click on one of the results takes you either to the location of the file, if you are not already in that folder, or the item is opened.

Full Text Search

The Full Text Search app enables you to search not only for file names but also for content inside files. The most common file formats are supported.

Rules for Full Text Search

  • Like with the regular search, you can enter only the first part of a string and it matches all occurrences of words starting with the search string.

  • OR case: When using more than one search term without any quotes, separated by a blank, each term is treated with a logical OR, case insensitive. Searching for Desktop Sync will return all results that contain Desktop or Sync.

  • AND / NOT case: When using more than one search term prefixed either by a plus (+) or minus (-) symbol, separated by a blank, each term that is prefixed with a + is treated with a logical AND, terms that are prefixed with a - are treated as a logical NOT. All checks are case insensitive. Searching for +Desktop +Sync -MSI will return all results that contain Desktop AND Sync but not NOT MSI.

  • Exact case: When using more than one search term enclosed with quotes, separated by a blank, the complete term is the search pattern. Searching for "Desktop Sync" will return all results that contain Desktop Sync. Note that beside any match, all existing file names are additionally listed as matches.

  • Wildcards: When looking for all terms containing a specific string like "pain", wildcards can be used. Using an asterisk like *ain gives you results like braine, pain, Spain and painful. Using a question mark like ?ain limits the preceding characters to exactly one, only pain and painful would show up.

    Using the asterisk within a word will ignore everything that follows after the asterisk. A trailing asterisk is always assumed in the search.