Search inside thousand of InDesign files.

Did you Find a Solution?

It is technically feasible to search for plain text in InDesign, but it's rather difficult (also I cannot vouch for its accuracy, as my solution would be highly experimental).

What platform are you on? What sort of text would you be looking for? (E.g., single words, phrases, sentences, GREP syntax and so on.) What result are you looking for? (E.g., just "this text is in the document", or any/all positions, or surrounding text, or specific page numbers.)

Eugene's suggestion is very good as you can implement it right away - it would take a couple of nights to convert all of those documents to another format but on the other hand, you only have to do that once! I suggest taking a handful of your documents and converting them to RTF, then check if the concept works and you can find what you want in these.

You could use batch convert

Free script Batch convert/export InDesign documents | Peter Kahrel

Make pdfs of all files with the same name

or RTF files of all files so they all have the same name.

Then you could search those.