Pocket Premium Full-Text Search

Full-Text Search is part of Pocket Premium. To subscribe to Pocket Premium, click here.

Full-Text Search provides fast and powerful search functionality that’s unlocked with Pocket Premium. When you search after upgrading, Pocket will search through the entire content of every item you’ve saved, making it easy to find what you’re looking for.

Please Note: You must be online to use Full-Text Search. While offline, you can use standard search to find items with their title or URL only.

Expanded Search Features

Our basic search feature searches only the title or URL of a saved item. With a Premium upgrade, you can search the full text of articles to get more detailed, accurate results. In addition, you can search by tags, topics, authors, and more by using search operators.

Tap the Search Options button to change the sorting of your search results. By default, searches are shown in order of relevance, but you have the option of sorting by Newest or Oldest First.

When searching in Pocket for iOS, Android, and in your browser, results from your List and Archive are shown simultaneously in the All Items tab. Just select “My List” or “Archive” from the drop-down menu to narrow your search to one of these lists.

Tag Search

Premium subscribers can search by Tags. You can even enter multiple tags at once to hone your search even more. Search results with Tags are weighted more heavily, which means that they’ll be among the first results to be displayed.

Recent Searches

Pocket Premium will remember your five most recent searches so you can easily return to the list of results. Plus, these recent searches will sync across your Pocket apps so you can continue a search on another device or computer.

Advanced Search Operators

To find precisely what you’re looking for, you can craft advanced searches using Boolean operators. Listed below are the search operators we support, with quick examples showing how they may be used:


OperatorExampleExplanation!
ORsuperman OR batmanFind items with either search term
ANDsuperman AND batmanFind items that include both search terms
NOTsuperman NOT batmanFind items that include the first term but not the second term
"sample""superman vs. batman"Find the exact phrase
sample+batmanRequires that the search results include this search term
#tag#coffeeFind items that have a certain tag
tag:tagtag:coffeeFind items that have a certain tag
#"one tag"#"coffee beans"Find items that have a certain multi-word tag
tag:"one tag"tag:"coffee beans"Find items that have a certain multi-word tag
Note: The OR, AND and NOT operators must be typed in ALL CAPS.

Common Questions

How is Full-Text Search different from free Pocket accounts?

In the free version of Pocket, searches are limited to title and URL only. In Pocket Premium, you can search instead using many other operators and options such as Tags, keywords in the article, and more.

Premium search capabilities like tags, keywords, and advanced search operators are weighed above title and url in Pocket Premium. Searching via title and URL only are limited to free accounts. It's not possible to isolate search results to only the title of an item. If you aren't finding the search results you're looking for, try searching using tags, using text from the article body, using the quotes operator or one of the other operators mentioned above in this article.

If you have any additional questions about using Full-Text Search, click here to contact Pocket Support with details about your search inquiry.

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