How to search for content in icloud files

iCloud can’t be searched because, being a webpage, it has no equivalent of the Spotlight technology which builds the index for you to search. This then means that you have to navigate through your content to find items. The navigation to your iCloud files is, like Finder on a Mac, by icon (called Grid), and file name (called List), and within these displays you can order by date, kind, name, or size, but it does not allow searching.

There are other controls such as emailing a document, sharing, downloading, deleting, and others so that is very sophisticated compared with what I remember some years ago.

PaquetonRR wrote:

Thank you, David, for the reply. Yes, I can find file names. How do I search for words inside the file?

The same way. I just searched in my iPhone files app for a word inside one of my documents - which wasn't a file title - and it found the document. I wasn't aware that this could be done so thanks for the question; I nearly always use my Mac to search for my things.

There are other ways to search on your iPhone as Apple describes in Search with Spotlight on iPhone - Apple Support

In iOS you can use the search box in the Files app. This searches your iCloud Drive content.

You can do the same thing on a Mac using Spotlight or a Finder search (command/F)

Oddly enough, searching for both files and keywords in files on dedicated cloud service websites has been able to be handled by the likes of Dropbox, Google Drive, Microsoft Cloud, Mega and many others, only somehow Apple can't