Use Vault to search Google Drive

Vault searches Drive for all files owned by and directly shared with the users specified in your search entry. This includes files in a shared drive that are directly shared with a user, regardless of whether the user is a member of that shared drive.

Vault also searches:

• All files owned by and directly shared with the users specified in your search query.
• Shared drives in your organization that have been shared directly with users in your query.
• Files in shared drives that have been shared directly with users in your query.
• Files in external shared drives that have been shared directly with users in your query. Note that Vault can't search an externally owned shared drive that has been shared with users in your organization, even if it includes files that are shared directly with those users.

Yes, when you search for files in Drive, you have two options:

• When you're searching for files belonging to specific users or organizational units, you can check a box to include results from their associated shared drives in your search.
• You can use Vault to find shared drives. You can then search selected shared drives for files.

You can search for words and phrases that occur in file names and in the contents of files. Vault indexes the first 100 pages of text files and the first 10 pages of text in image PDFs.

You can search text within the following file types:

• Microsoft Word, Excel, and Powerpoint
• .pdf
• .html
• .txt
• .rtf
• OpenOffice™ XML
• Wireless Application Protocol (.wap)
• Wireless Markup Language (.wml)
• Google Earth (.kml)

Vault doesn't index video, audio, image, or binary files.

You can preview these files:

• Google files such as Docs, Sheets, Slides, and Drawings
• User-uploaded files such as .docx, .pdf, and .xlsx

Users can link a Google file  to another Google file. For example, someone writing in a Google Doc can create a chart that's linked to data contained in a Google Sheet. Whenever the spreadsheet is updated, the chart in the document is also updated.

When you search files in Drive, Vault returns only the files that match your search criteria. If those files include linked files that fall outside of your query, the linked files aren't included in your results.

No. You can search only the most recent version of a file. However, you can enter a version date as part of your search. When you enter a version date, Vault retrieves a snapshot of the file’s contents as of 12:00 AM UTC on the given date. Versioning is supported only in Google Drive for Google Docs, Sheets, Slides, and Drawings. 

Some properties are reported for the current version, no matter what version date you specify. These include the title, who it was shared with, when it was last modified, and other data in Vault’s metadata.xml file.

Version snapshots include comments, subject to the following criteria:

• Open comments are included only if your organization has comment or edit access to the document. Comments aren’t included if you only have view access.
• An open individual comment (one with no replies) is included if: 1) the comment was created as of the version date, and 2) the commented text existed in that version (even if the commented text is now deleted). A comment isn’t included in versions from before the comment was created.
• An open comment thread (one with replies) is included in its entirety if: 1) the first comment was created as of the version date, and 2) the commented text existed in that version (even if the commented text is now deleted). For example, if a comment thread has two messages that were created on October 1 and October 5, a search with the version date of October 2 contains both comments even though the October 5 comment didn’t exist at the time.
• Edited comments are included as they currently exist, not how they were at the version time.
• Resolved or deleted comments aren’t included in a version, even if the comment was open at the version time.

No. You can't search the top organizational unit. Select a child organizational unit or individual users. You can search Drive for up to 5,000 users total (as individual users or members of organizational units).