I’ve got a pile of scanned PDFs and need to search inside them for specific words. Tried a few options but they keep missing text. Any good search engine for scanned documents?
That is annoying, especially when the scans look clear but are really just images. You need OCR first, then search the resulting text layer; Adobe Acrobat’s Recognise Text has been fairly reliable for my tutoring worksheets. For a big batch, I’d test a few files with OCRmyPDF too, and make sure the scan is at least 300 dpi, as faint or skewed pages will still miss words.
Had the same issue last month with scanned field forms. Those PDFs are just pictures, so you need OCR, which is software that reads the words from the images. I ran it in Adobe Acrobat and then searching worked fine. Google Drive might do the same for free but I’m not sure how well it handles messy scans.