New: AI Chat that does the reading. It searches your library, reads the pages it needs and answers with sources you can click.
PDF Search indexes every word in your documents and finds the right page in
seconds. Then ask a question in plain words: AI Chat searches your library,
reads the pages that matter and answers with sources you can click.
Built for people who live in documents: researchers, lawyers, students,
analysts and writers.
AI CHAT THAT DOES THE READING
Ask a question and AI Chat goes to work like a research assistant: it searches
your whole library with PDF Search's own ranking, opens and reads the pages it
needs, and answers with numbered sources. Click a source and the document opens
on that page.
• No setup: ask about everything you have indexed, or about what you are reading
• Watch it work: every search and every page it reads is listed under the answer
• Scanned pages are read too, with on-device text recognition
• Find every mention in a document, count, compare and calculate
• Paste or drop an image to ask about it
• Conversations are saved; pick one up later
CHOOSE WHERE YOUR AI RUNS
• Apple Intelligence: on your Mac, or on Apple's Private Cloud Compute. Free,
private, nothing to configure (Apple Intelligence required)
• Built-in AI: works on any Mac, pay as you go with credit packs
• Your own Gemini API key
• Local models with Ollama or LM Studio: fully offline, nothing leaves your Mac
SEARCH THAT RANKS, NOT JUST MATCHES
Ordinary search tells you a word exists somewhere. PDF Search scores every page
on how well it answers you (where the words appear, how close together they
are, whether they sit in a heading or in bold) and shows the strongest pages
first, from every document at once.
• Results grouped by document, every matching page with its rank
• Your words highlighted on the page
• Live progress while thousands of documents are ranked
• Similar words, plurals and word roots (Apple's Natural Language framework)
• Search everything, or only a folder, a tag or the current results
• A global shortcut and a menu bar search, from any app
WORDS INSIDE IMAGES
Scanned books, photographed pages, screenshots and image-only PDFs are read with
on-device text recognition and indexed like any other text. When a hit is
inside an image, PDF Search scans the page in front of you and highlights it.
ONE INDEX FOR EVERYTHING
• Any folder on your Mac, external drives and iCloud Drive
• PDF, Word, PowerPoint, OpenDocument, Pages, Keynote, RTF, Markdown, plain
text, logs and source code
• Indexing runs quietly in the background while you work
• Tags, bookmarks with notes, highlights and annotations
• Export the pages that matter as one PDF, or share the result list
• Send documents and their ready-made index to PDF Search on iPhone and iPad
over Wi-Fi
PRIVATE BY DESIGN
Indexing, text recognition and search happen on your Mac, and your documents
never leave it. AI Chat sends only the passages it reads to the AI you choose:
nothing at all with Apple Intelligence on device or a local model. No account
and no tracking.
FREE AND PRO
The free version indexes and searches all your documents, opens the
top-ranked results and includes AI Chat. Pro adds:
• Search inside images and scans
• Plurals, word roots and similar words
• Every ranked result, not just the first ones
• Export results and skip duplicate documents
Pro comes as a monthly or annual subscription, or a one-off lifetime unlock.
Credit packs for the built-in AI are separate, one-time purchases; Apple
Intelligence, your own key and local models need no credits.
SUBSCRIPTION TERMS
Payment is charged to your Apple Account at confirmation of purchase. A
subscription renews automatically unless cancelled at least 24 hours before the
end of the current period, and renewal is charged within 24 hours of that.
Manage or cancel any time in your Apple Account settings.
Privacy Policy: https://pdfsearch.mozkan.com/privacy.html
Terms of Use: https://pdfsearch.mozkan.com/terms.html
This app hasn’t received enough ratings or reviews to display an overview.
Functionality great at first, issues with support
RDaneel Olivaaw
PDF Search worked great for about a week then stopped working. I contacted support via email, never heard back from them. Removed and reinstalled the app and it works again but now it prompts to pay a second time. Does not recognize the Restore Previous Purchase function I have asked Apple for a refund.UPDATE: I figured out what happened. I had activated the app using the license key from your email. The next time the App Store prompted me to install updates I did and a different (newer?) version of PDF Search installed. That is when it stopped being recognized as PRO. I have removed everything, reinstalled from the link in my purchase email, and reactivated. Everything is working now. This is confusing and, I assume, I should never let the App Store update PDF Search and only do that from Check Updates within the app. Thanks for getting back to me.
Developer Response
Hi Olivaaw, Sorry for the bad experience you had. I have checked for your email but somehow it didn’t reach to me. Can you use our support page to contact? I will do my best to help you. For restore purchase problem, is it oossible that you have bought our paid PRO version (with black icon) and then tried to restore it downloading free version? If this is the case please check PDF Search PRO (paid app) to download. For any case I can help you better if you contact through our support page. Regards.
Best of Application Type
Mheprai
Having used PDFSearch for several months now, I am significantly empowered by it's ability to quickly locate content that I have read as well have not yet read. Given about 30,000 documents of which 7,500 or so are books, I can quickly locate research topics in books wherein I would never find this information manually, thus extending my research capabilites simply due to this profound access and retrieval app. Choose a keyword and every book or document you have wil be presented to you in a beuatiful graphical format with the referenced page visible in the adjacent window. Further, the developer, Muharrem, is very thoughtful and helpful and provides personal support when needed. I highly recommend this app to anyone who is a student, a reporter, a researcher or writer, a teacher of professor that needs to pull information together quickly to present a lecture for example, or someone with a great deal of information they have carefully saved on their computer over the years. Apple Spotlight pales in comparison.
Quite helpful search tool
Developmental biologist
I very much appreciate PDF Search (currently using Version 1.7). I have thousands of PDFs on my computer, with quite a few folders holding the bulk of them. Years ago I gave up on the idea of tags; I saved PDFs faster than I could decide on what tags to use! Instead I depend on searches. What makes PDF Search so handy is its display of the documents located and their ranking, the display showing the first page of each document and, when selected, the document itself with search terms highlighted. Quite often that first page display alone jogs my memory of the circumstances that led me to collect it in the first place. The indexing process itself takes some time for folders with hundreds of PDFs of course, but that’s hardly a problem because it’s happening in the background. This is a good tool to have on hand.
Best search app for large collections, but limited in features.
branawesome
The search functions are the best I've found, especially if you have large collections. I'm using this with about 2300 documents (~20GB) of PDFs. Props to the developer! Streamling the search of such large collections is an incredible achievement. The integration with an AI chat (Google's Gemeni) is decent as well. Some feedback:- Needs a unique name, it's difficult to search for this app with such a generic name "PDF Search"- Needs more features for organizing material once you find things. Bookmarks and tags are only marginally useful.- Searching a single PDF is difficult to do. Having a "Search selected" would be extremely helpful. - Using AI chat with selected documents would be great as well.- Saving a search result would be very useful.- Support for multiple windows/instances of the app would also be very useful.Build out the feature set a bit, and you'll be swimming in money from people doing research.
• Various bug fixes
Version 16.0.1
The developer, Muharrem Ozkan, indicated that the app’s privacy practices may include handling of data as described below. For more information, see the developer’s privacy policy .
Data Not Linked to You
The following data may be collected but it is not linked to your identity:
Identifiers
Privacy practices may vary, for example, based on the features you use or your age. Learn More
Accessibility
The developer has not yet indicated which accessibility features this app supports. Learn More