Refining your search

Sometimes, your first search for a particular term results in too many matching files pulled from the PDF document collection, and you find that you need to refine your search further narrow the search results. To do this, follow these steps:

1. Click the Refine Search Results link near the bottom of the Search PDF pane to display Advanced Search options in the Search PDF pane. Note that when you refine your search in this manner, the options you choose are applied to the previous search results.
2. Replace or further refine the search term in the Search Within the Previous Results For text box.
3. Select a new option, if desired, in the Return Results Containing dropdown list, and then select or deselect the Whole Words Only, Case-Sensitive, Proximity, or Stemming check boxes to further refine your search criteria.
4. Click the Refine Search Results button to begin your new search.

The Advanced Search options that appear in the Use These Additional Criteria section of the Search PDF pane provide a means of using metadata and date filtering as search criteria. These powerful search options are covered in the next section.
By default, Acrobat displays its Basic Search options when you choose Edit➪Search or press Ctrl+F (Ô+F on Mac) to initiate a search. The Advanced Search options are displayed only when you choose Refine Search Results in the Search PDF pane after performing a basic search. To have Acrobat display the Advanced Search options rather than the Basic Search options in the Search PDF pane when you initiate a search, choose Edit➪Preferences or press Ctrl+K (Ô+K on Mac) to open the Preferences dialog box. Click Search in the list box to display the Search options. Select the Always Use Advanced Search Options check box, and then click OK to close the Preferences dialog box. Note that when you choose this option, you won’t have access to the Basic Search options until you turn off this feature by deselecting the check box in the Search section of the Preferences dialog box.