Egnyte offers a powerful search experience to help users quickly find the files and folders they need. From basic keyword search with auto-suggestions to advanced filters, metadata-based search, image similarity and geolocation search, the system is built to handle a wide range of use cases.
AI-generated overviews enable the users to explore results more efficiently and saved searches let users quickly revisit frequent queries.
This article goes into the details of each capability included when searching in Egnyte.
Comments and Tasks are not included in searches.
Default Search
Auto-Suggestions
AI Search Overview
Quick Search Filters
Advanced Search Options
Metadata Search
Image Similarity Search
Geolocation Search
Save Search
Search Details
Default Search
Entering a term, like “floor plan,” will return results that contain that term, like “floor plan building” or “floor-plan-building”.
Words are automatically split at case transitions. For instance, ‘PowerShot’ is broken into ‘Power’ and ‘Shot’ so it will not match with words like ‘Powershot’.
Auto-Suggestions
When a user begins typing a search term, Egnyte automatically suggests files and folders based on their recent activity and bookmarks. This is useful in quickly locating frequently accessed items without needing to fully type out the query or sift through longer lists of results.
AI Search Overview
Users can view the AI overview generated based on their search results. This overview is a quick, AI-generated summary based on the user’s query and the top hits in the search results. The source files analyzed to generate the AI-powered overview are also listed by its side.
The users can click on any of the source files listed under AI overview to be redirected to the file preview and they can Ask their queries on the specific file.
They can also use the icons below the AI overview to copy the content generated and provide their feedback on the response.
This feature also supports natural language queries such as:
- “List all the 2025 company holidays”
- “What is my insurance policy number?”
AI Search Overview is accessible to users with an active Copilot add-on. Contact your account manager or Egnyte Sales team for more information.
Quick Search Filters
Search Current Folder Or Entire Account
The user can search only the items contained in their current folder, or can search their entire account. By default, only the items contained in the current folder are searched. User can search the entire account by changing the location setting to All Folders.
Search For Items Containing Any Or All Words
Users can search for items that contain any of the search words entered, or search for items that include all of the search words entered. By default, the search will return results that contain any of the words entered. Users can restrict the results to items that contain all of the search words by choosing All search words in the dropdown menu.
Search Through Folders Or Files
Egnyte account might contain tens of thousands of folders and files; finding a single one of those could be tough. Egnyte has a folder or file search option for this use case. Select Folders, and it will return folders that match the search criteria; select Files and only files matching the search will appear.
Filter Search Results By Modified Time
Users can narrow down search results so that they include only files modified within a certain time period. Modified Time filter can be used in such scenarios. Users can choose only to see files modified within the last 24 hours, week, month, 3 months, 6 months, the last year or define a specific time period.
Advanced Search Options
Filter Search by Folder
The user can choose to search in the current (default) or any folder in the domain.
Filter Search Results by Content
The user can choose to keep the search limited to any (default), only files, or only folders. They can also select the content attributes where the search shall be performed at file and folder levels.
Filter Search Results By File Type
The user can limit the search results to only show certain types of file formats. For instance, if the user is looking for an image file, they can select Image from the list so all other file types will be excluded from the results.
Filter Search Results by Modified Time
If the user knows the file they are looking for was modified within a specific time frame, they can use the Modified Time filter to narrow the results. They can choose only to find files modified any time (default), within the last 24 hours, week, month, 3 months, 6 months, the last year, or within a specific time period.
Filter Search Results By Uploaded Time
If the user knows the file they are looking for was uploaded within a specific time frame, they can use the Uploaded Time filter to narrow the results. They can choose only to find files uploaded any time (default), within the last 24 hours, week, month, 3 months, 6 months, the last year, or within a specific time period.
Filter Results Based on Updated by
The users can filter the search results based on the content being updated by Anyone (default), themselves, and by a specific person.
Wildcard Search
Users can insert an asterisk to act as a wildcard in their search; this will pick up any extra letters or suffixes that might be attached to the search term. For instance, a user is looking for any files and folders that contain the word “image” in the name. Searching for “image” alone would miss results like “images” or “image-new,” but adding an asterisk ensures those results are fetched.
Search for at Least One Term ("OR")
If the user uses AND, OR, NOT keywords in the search query, the ‘Any Search Words/All Search Words’ setting in the quick filters will be ignored.
Entering multiple terms will return folders and files that pertain to any of those search terms. For example, a search for “image capture” would return any items where either “image” or “capture” is relevant. In this case, the “Capture” file name pertains to the term “capture,” but has nothing to do with the search term “image.” Spaces between search terms are interpreted as "OR."
Search for All Terms ("AND")
If the user uses AND, OR, NOT keywords in the search query, the ‘Any Search Words/All Search Words’ setting in the quick filters will be ignored.
The user can narrow the search by inserting the word "AND" in all capital letters between each term. This will limit results to files that contain both terms. Searching “image and capture” yields only results where both terms are relevant.
Search for a Specific Phrase
If the user is looking for a specific phrase, they can also search using quotation marks. This will only yield files that contain that exact phrase. In the example below, searching “create folder templates” will only return items that match that string.
Boolean Search
If the user uses AND, OR, NOT keywords in the search query, the ‘Any Search Words/All Search Words’ setting in the quick filters will be ignored.
Certain Boolean operations (AND, OR, NOT) are supported in Egnyte search. Egnyte supports grouping to allow adjusting how multiple Boolean operators work together using parentheses to group words.
- For instance, the filename is “marketing plan 22072024 powershot a 123”, then a valid search criteria to fetch the file will be “marketing plan” AND “powershot a”.
- Similarly, if the filename is “marketing plan 22072024 powerShot a 123”, then a valid search criteria to fetch the file will be “marketing plan” AND “power shot a”.
- Similarly, if the filename is “marketing plan 22072024 a 123” (and it does not contain the word "powershot"), then a valid search criteria to fetch the file will be “marketing plan” NOT "powershot"
Metadata Search
If the user has Metadata set up in Egnyte's Web UI or with API, they can add metadata search criteria to their search options by selecting the three dots next to the search bar, and clicking metadata search criteria.
Users can click on the dropdown to select the metadata section and apply it to the search criteria by clicking Apply.
They can click on Add another metadata tags section to continue to add other metadata tags sections to the search criteria. Users can reset the metadata search criteria by clicking on Clear all.
If there are two or more metadata tags sections added to the search criteria, the users can click on the respective remove icon to remove the criteria from the search.
Egnyte’s file search engine will also consider a folder or file’s metadata (i.e. the folder where it lives, notes added to the file, etc.) when determining how relevant a result is. Although, a file’s name is weighted more heavily than metadata. Learn about using Egnyte's Metadata API on the domain.
Image Similarity Search
Image Similarity Search can locate images that are visually similar. This feature provides an efficient way to find related images based on the image being viewed in a folder list or search result.
Users can search for similar images by:
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Clicking the More like this row action, which is shown below.
-OR- - Selecting More like this within the context menu via normal selecting or right-clicking the image file.
The system will then use the selected image as a reference to find and display other images in the folder structure that share visual similarities.
This feature is accessible to users with an active Project Control Add-On. Contact the account manager or Egnyte Sales team for more information.
Geolocation Search
This feature is accessible to users with an active AEC package. It enables users to locate images taken in specific places. By harnessing the EXIF data within image files, this feature accurately identifies the geolocation of photos, providing the user with the ability to conveniently search and organize their image collection.
How to Leverage Geolocation Search
- Select the Geolocation Search tile from the Advanced search menu.
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In the pop-up window, the system defaults to the current location.
- If the location is incorrect, make sure the location has been granted for the given device. Check the browser's site settings and ensure location access is allowed for the Egnyte domain.
- If the location is incorrect, make sure the location has been granted for the given device. Check the browser's site settings and ensure location access is allowed for the Egnyte domain.
- Alternatively, manually enter the desired address or geo-coordinates.
- Adjust the radius slider to fine-tune the search area according to the preference.
- Click Apply to locate all images taken within the specified vicinity.
Save Search
The user can save the queries that they run often (such as finding all spreadsheets with the word ‘expense’ in the title that have been uploaded within the last week). When a search query is saved, all search keywords as well as all associated search filters are saved.
In order to save a query, first execute the search, and then click Save Search on the Search results screen.
Users would be prompted to provide a name for the saved query.
To execute a previously-saved search, click on the saved searches dropdown and select the query to execute.
Search Details
Search Trash
Egnyte's search results do not include files in the trash. To learn more about searching in the Trash, refer to this article.
Search Weights
Filenames have a higher weight in scoring results. The number of matches within a file also plays a role in ranking the search results. In addition to that, files modified relatively recently will have a higher weight.
Tokenized Search of File and Folder Names
When searching for a file or folder name, Egnyte tokenizes the search into groups of 3 letters called trigrams. For example, searching for "brexit" would create four tokens ("bre," "rex," "exi," and "xit") and any file/folder name which matches at least 50% of search tokens would be considered a match. A folder named "Existing Breaks" would be displayed in the search results since it matches two out of the four tokens ("bre" and "exi") but a folder named "Breaks" would not be displayed since it only matches one token ("bre").
Searching Document Content
Text from the following file types are searchable: doc, docx, docm, xls, xlsx, xlsm, ppt, pptx, pptm, pdf, htm, html, txt, rtf, xml, pages, numbers, key, msg, zip, tar, tgz, odp, ods, odt, tsv, xhtml, csv, dot, wbk, dotm, docb, xlt, xlm, xlsm, xltx, xltm, xlsb, xla, xlam, xll, xlw, ppt, pot, pps, potx, potm, ppam, ppsx, ppsm, sldx, sldm, ps, epub, mbox.
- Text content is indexed for search for files smaller than 20MB.
- Egnyte also limits the indexed text to no more than 50KB of extracted text and 10,000 tokens (words).