Egnyte’s search tool makes it possible to search for vast quantities of files and folders quickly. When searching for content, there are a few things you should keep in mind to ensure you get the most out of your searches.
Comments and Tasks are not included in searches.
Default Search
Search Filters
Advanced Search Options
Metadata Search
Saved Search
Search Details
Default Search
Entering a term, like “image,” will return results that contain that term, like “stock images” or “file-selected-expanded-image.”
Quick Search Filters
Search Current Folder or Entire Account
You can search only the items contained in your current folder, or you can search your entire account. By default, only the items contained in your current folder are searched. You can search the entire account by changing the location setting to ‘All Folders’.
Search for Items Containing Any or All Words
You can search for items that contain any of the search words you entered, or search for items that contain all of the search words you entered. By default, the search will return results that contain any of the words you entered. You 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
Your Egnyte account might contain tens of thousands of folders and files; finding a single one of those could be tough. Fortunately, we have a folder or file search option just for this use case. Select Folders, and it will return folders that match your search criteria; select Files and only files matching your search will appear.
Filter Search Results by Modified Time
If you want to narrow down search results so that they include only files modified within a certain time period, it is possible to use the "Modified Time" filter for that. You 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.
Save User Defaults for Quick Filters
If you use some specific quick filter settings for most of your searches, you can lock (save) the filter set as your own default settings. Click on the lock icon to save the filter set.
Once locked, these filter values will be automatically populated every time you start a new search. You can override these for ad-hoc searches by choosing different values from the dropdown menus. Click on the lock icon again to get back to system defaults.
Advanced Search Options
Filter Search Results by File Type
You can limit the search results to only show certain types of file formats. If you know you're looking for an image file, select Image from the list so all other file types will be excluded from your results.
Filter Search Results by Uploaded Time
If you know the file you're looking for was uploaded within a specific time frame, you can use the Uploaded Time filter to narrow your results. You can choose only to find files uploaded within the last 24 hours, week, month, 3 months, 6 months, the last year, or within a specific time period.
Filter Results by Who Last Updated the Content
The Updated by filter makes it easy to find content when you know the last person that made changes to the data. You can search by Anyone, Me, or by a specific person's name or email address.
You cannot search by someone's username.
Wildcard Search
You can insert an asterisk to act as a wildcard in your search; this will pick up any extra letters or suffixes that might be attached to your search term. Imagine you’re 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 you’ll catch those results.
Search for at Least One Term ("OR")
If you use 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 you use AND, OR, NOT keywords in the search query, the ‘Any Search Words/All Search Words’ setting in the quick filters will be ignored.
You can narrow your 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
Finally, if you are looking for a specific phrase, you can also search using quotation marks. This will only yield files that contain that exact phrase. In the example below, searching “Waterfront home” will only return items that match that string.
Boolean Search
If you use 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 you to adjust how multiple Boolean operators work together using parentheses to group words.
Metadata Search
If you have Metadata set up in Egnyte's Web UI or with API, you can add metadata search criteria to your search options by selecting the three dots next to the search bar, and clicking metadata search criteria.
From here, you can select to search for any metadata section and property you've added to a file or folder. Click Search to add that to your existing search filters.
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. Generally speaking, though, a file’s name is weighted more heavily than metadata. Learn about using Egnyte's Metadata API on your domain.
Saved Search
You can save the queries that you run often (such as find 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.
At that point, you 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 you would like 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, we tokenize 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. We also limit the indexed text to no more than 50KB of extracted text and 10,000 tokens (words).