Advanced Searching

Introduction

A search needs to start from an initial folder. This can be any folder, a Team Drive or the root of your Google Drive. Once you have opened a folder, you will be able to click the Search command from the Folders menu.

Search Parameters

The search dialog box (shown above) allows you to fully customise your search, or use one of the shortcut buttons to pre-fill some of the parameters for you. You can mix and match by entering some of your own parameters, and use the shortcut buttons to fill in others. If you wish to lock a particular field to ensure it is not overridden when you press a shortcut, you can click on the lock_open / lock icons above the field.

• Names - This will return items with names that contain the strings you enter in this box. If you want to search for more than one name simultaneously (using an OR operator), then enter the strings on separate lines.
• Visibility - This will control what items are returned by the search by filtering by their sharing visibility. If you wish to search only files shared with you, ensure you tick ‘Search Entire Drive’ first, as folders are excluded in this type of search.
• Mime Type - The types of items which will be returned. Please refer to the Google, common and complete list of types if you need to find a particular one.
• Properties - This will search for items that have specified tags / properties with the following formats:
  • name - Will return items that have this named tag, regardless of the value
  • name=value - Will return items that have tags with the specified name and value
  • name>=value - Will return items that have tags with the specified name and value greater than or equal to the specified value
  • name<=value - Will return items that have tags with the specified name and value less than or equal to the specified value
  • name!=value - Will return items that have tags with the specified name and value not equal to the specified value
• Exclude Regexes - Item names matching any of supplied regular expressions will be excluded from the results
• Include Regexes - Item names matching any of these will be included in the results (non-matches will be excluded)
• Recursive Search - Choosing to search all sub-folders will return results in the current folder and any descendent folders too. For large folder sets, this could take a long time to complete
• Entire Drive - If you choose to search your entire drive using simple search terms (mime types, names and property=value) then this will be a much faster search

Performance

A simple search (using just mime types, names and property=value parameters) can leverage the native Google Search API if you choose to search your entire drive. Complex and recursive searches will take much longer (potentially minutes, rather than seconds) so if you can use a simple search, then this will be far more performant. An example of this might be searching for items that are marked as confidential using tags. A search using:

Confidentiality=High
Confidentiality=Medium

Will, therefore, be much faster than:

Confidentiality!=Low