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Once upon a time, the Onedrive search feature allowed you to search file contents, as well as file names.
Now it appears that Onedrive only allows you to search file names.
When did this change, and why? Content searches were a very practical feature.
Microsoft will lose users to better services (such as Google Drive) if it continues to make regressive changes like this. Being able to search file contents is a very low bar in 2024.
A Microsoft file hosting and synchronization service.
Locked Question. This question was migrated from the Microsoft Support Community. You can vote on whether it's helpful, but you can't add comments or replies or follow the question.
Oh boy, I have no words for this customer support service. I know a personal customer does not pay a fortune, but still...
I swear I can search file content of text files, Office files, PDFs, and even JPEGs (not metadata; pure OCR).
Not as good as Google Drive's, but I'm sure this person who answered you has no clue whatsoever.
Thank you, I'm going to take this up (again) with customer support.
kpt
After being unavailable for approximately a year, the search functionality returned a couple of weeks ago, and I observed that it now operates reliably, including the ability to search within file contents.
Despite the return of this functionality, I think that for users who expect consistency and stability from cloud services, OneDrive is too unreliable.
Based on this post, I tested my OneDrive and the search function is now working for my tenant. I can search within Word documents, PDF documents, JPG files, etc. I'm amazed!
As others have said, this is fundamental functionality for a cloud storage service so I'm pleased it has finally be restored. Lets just hope it remains and is stable.
Thanks for prompting me to try it again!
Just tested. It's still not working for me. I wonder why it works for some and not others.
That's the annoying thing, some people have got the search function back.
I've had a further reply from OneDrive Support to say that the "engineering team is working diligently on the issue. I assure you we are giving it our utmost priority. Currently we do not have an ETA on this issue."
And they have closed the case, then invited me to give feedback on the support I received. I did.
kpt