---
title: "Understanding Quick Search"
slug: "understanding-quick-search"
updated: 2025-09-14T14:37:03Z
published: 2025-09-14T14:37:03Z
canonical: "documentation.encodify.com/understanding-quick-search"
---

> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://documentation.encodify.com/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Understanding Quick Search

## Overview

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**Quick Search** allows you to quickly find items in Encodify using keywords or by searching within documents. You can locate specific records, files, or content without manually browsing through modules.

Quick Search supports:

- **Keyword searches** – Find items using terms, phrases, and operators. (See [**Quick Search Syntax**](/v1/docs/quick-search-syntax) for details.)
- **Document searches** – Look for specific content inside attached files.

This feature helps you locate the information you need faster, whether you are searching across items, comments, or file content.

## Quick Search Preconditions

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Before using **Quick Search**, items and files must be indexed to make them searchable.

- **Item indexing** happens automatically whenever an item is created or updated in the system. No additional configuration is required.
- **File indexing** is **disabled by default**. To search within files, indexing must first be enabled by an Encodify administrator.

> [!WARNING]
> **Note:** Indexing ensures that all relevant content is included in Quick Search results, improving accuracy and performance.

## Quick Search Limits and Restrictions

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By default, **Quick Search** can return a maximum of **10,000 items**. If a search query returns more than this, users will be prompted to refine their search to narrow the results.

Administrators can configure:

- **Maximum result count** – the highest number of items returned by Quick Search.
- **Leading wildcards** – can be disabled to prevent high server load from broad or inaccurate queries.
- **Supported file formats** – defines which file types are indexed for text search.

> [!WARNING]
> **Important:** Changes to these settings must be applied by an Encodify administrator. After adjustments, it may be necessary to run a [reindex job](/v1/docs/reindex-items-script) to ensure Quick Search functions correctly. The default supported file formats include common document types such as PDF, DOCX, XLSX, PPTX, and XML. Administrators should verify new file formats before enabling them for text extraction to ensure they are supported by the system.