Search PDF

What does the Search PDF tool do?

The FreePDF Search tool extracts the text of your document in the browser with PDF.js and makes every page searchable. Find every occurrence of a word or phrase instantly and jump to the right page.

For scanned documents, run OCR PDF first — searching needs a text layer to look at.

How to search

1. 1
   Open your PDF in the editor

   Drag and drop the document you want to search.

2. 2
   Extract the text

   PDF.js reads the text layer of every page locally in your browser.

3. 3
   Search and jump

   Type your query — matches are shown per page and you can jump straight to them.

4. 4
   Copy what you need

   Copy matching passages to the clipboard for reuse.

What FreePDF Search PDF can do

• Instant search across all pages
• Per-page match listing
• Copy text from matches
• Works entirely in your browser

Privacy — your files stay on your device

Search PDF runs entirely inside your browser using the same open-source engine stack that powers all FreePDF tools. Your files are loaded into browser memory, processed on your CPU, and written back out as a direct download. Nothing is sent to any server — you can verify this in your browser devtools → Network tab. Close the tab and everything is cleared from memory.

Supported devices and browsers

Known limitations

FreePDF is honest about what it can and cannot do:

• Scanned PDFs without a text layer need OCR first
• Handwritten text is not searchable
• Search works on extractable text, not images