Q: OS X Yosemite Preview search within PDF doesn't work

Are you sure there is actual text in that PDF. Some PDFs are just images of the text.

Can you select lines of text in the document?

Here is a PDF that definitely does have text, and my Preview searches fine: PDF "Dancing Links" - Dr. Donald Knuth, Stanford University ...

You must reinstall the OS to reinstall Preview. However, programs just don't break like that, so reinstalling likely will do nothing to help you.

As I already stated, reinstalling Preview will likely not change a thing. Apps cannot be written to, so there is nothing that will cause them to "break" besides hard disk corruption.

Something else is the problem. It could be with Spotlight. It could also be something else that may be corrected by an OS reinstall.

I would reindex Spotlight before I reinstalled, but then that shouldn't take too much time, depending on your internet connection.

http://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201716

And, if you don't maintain current backups, creating one will take a bunch of extra time.

If it got stuck during the install, then your problems may be related. If it was a problem with the recent update, you can try to install it again. Just download it from the Apple Downloads site: OS X Yosemite 10.10.1 Update

If you mean the initial upgrade to Yosemite, then you will have to reinstall that from Recovery.

OS X: About OS X Recovery - Apple Support

I don't know if it will help, but I would try reinstalling Hhe OS.

I have the same problem; not being able to search in Preview.  I tested one writer's theory and it did not pan out:

I opened a document in Preview, searched for a word that I could plainly see in the first paragraph.  It did not find the word.

So I highlighted the word, right-clicked, selected copy, then pasted the word into the Notes app.

So this document has text...because.....

Then, using the Notes app, I searched for the word and found it.

So text is not being found in Preview's Search function:

OS X Yosemite 10.10.2 on a Mac Mini

Discussion?  

WAIT!!  

After writing the above, I retested and now Preview IS finding text. 

I don't understand this.  I did not reboot. 

I am also having this problem. I'm not sure about other people, but for me it happens for documents individually. Once it starts happening for a document, it will always be broken for that document however searching other documents that it has not broken on works perfectly fine. I have noticed that it happens more often for larger documents (a few are 500+ pages), but in order for me to replicate the problem, I simply search the document roughly 5-6 times for different things. If I re-download the document it will be searchable while the one that I have already searched remains broken.

I tried the spotlight reindex as well as restoring the file (File->Revert To->Browse All->The earliest version it goes to) and it still does not work.

I don't have the option to reinstall OSX, and I doubt that's the problem anyway, I think it has something to do with Preview and large files being indexed or something of the sort.

Can anyone else weigh in on the size of the files that you were having issues with?

Edit: Problem happened on 10.10.1, 10.10.2 and it is still happening on 10.10.3, I never had this problem on Mountain Lion or Mavericks.

Similarly, since upgrading to El Capitan search in Preview works for some but not all documents. I typically use preview for reading books. Even when search does work, both of the Sort By buttons are highlighted - 'Search Rank' and 'Page Order' - which suggests that something else is not right. Combined with the fuzzy rendering in Preview in El Capitan, it's become unpleasant to use. I've switched to kamihq for reading PDFs and am largely happy with that.

My wife has been having this issue with one of her PDF ebooks in Preview within El Capitan for weeks.  In my attempts to help her, my Google search led me here.  Here is the solution that worked for us:

Learning above that Preview uses Spotlight indexes, and Spotlight indexes when a file is saved, I told her to simply re-save the file (she never makes changes to the PDF, so she had never done this).  We waited a few seconds, and searched again and voila, it worked!

Incidentally, this file was downloaded using Dropbox and resides in her Dropbox.  When she first linked the shared folder, we moved the folder within her Dropbox, so perhaps we screwed up the indexing with this file movement, leading to this issue.  Whatever the case, it's fixed now.

Hopefully this helps someone having similar issues.

A wholesale workaround appears to do something like compress all your pdfs into a single ZIP archive, delete the originals, unzip the archive and the "new" files are suddenly searchable again. I happen to have the majority of my pdfs in a single directory so this was easy, but it would be a lot better if it didn't happen. I do have other pdfs elsewhere. Are these indexed by spotlight? Annoying.

Thanks for this post.  This helped me out.  I did a command-s and then suddenly search works again.

I've always had search issues with Preview, though.  It's pretty pitiful.  It freaks when you put in some special characters, for one thing.