“1. Evernote — Best overall search for mixed archives”
“Searches note text, PDFs, Office documents, scanned images, and handwriting.”
“OCR and attachment matches are highlighted.”
“Semantic search can find notes even when you don't remember the original wording.”
“Can search audio and video transcripts.”
“Individual PDFs over 52 MB aren't processed for search.”
“2. DEVONthink — Best for serious document archives”
“Powerful document-centric search.”
“Searches PDF content without requiring conventional OCR in many cases.”
“Can use contextually similar words to find related material.”
“Excellent for collecting, classifying, and connecting large document libraries.”
“Primarily a Mac solution.”
“3. Microsoft OneNote — Best for handwriting and notebooks”
“Searches across multiple notebooks.”
“Recognizes handwriting and text in images.”
“Can search spoken words in audio and video recordings when enabled.”
“OCR can extract text from multi-page PDF printouts.”
“I'd test PDF attachment search carefully before moving a massive document archive into it.”
“4. Obsidian — Best for a customizable, long-term knowledge base”
“Excellent native search across Markdown notes.”
“Supports Boolean-style queries and filtering by tags and paths.”
“Plugins such as Omnisearch can improve relevance ranking and attachment search.”
“OCR Extractor can turn text in PDFs and images into searchable Markdown.”
“Native search alone doesn't search inside PDF attachments.”
“5. Zotero — Best for PDF-heavy research”
“Searches the full text of indexed PDFs.”
“Supports EPUB, HTML, and plain-text attachments.”
“Offers advanced search and saved searches.”
“Provides index statistics and the ability to rebuild indexes.”
“Outstanding for academic papers and research documents, but not a general-purpose notebook.”
“It doesn't index Word documents such as DOCX.”
“Its default PDF indexing limit is 100 pages per file.”
“Notion is excellent for structured knowledge bases, databases, and collaborative documentation.”
“Notion is excellent for structured knowledge bases, databases, and collaborative documentation.”
“Its workspace search can find words and phrases in pages.”
“However, I wouldn't make it my first choice for a huge archive where searching inside arbitrary PDF and image attachments is essential.”