Word search through thousands of pdf's?

Yes, absolutely. You could put your thousands of pdf files in a repository like blob storage, then index it and then query for the information in those PDFs. Note that there are many different types of PDFs. If you have scanned PDFs, you may want to add a skillset to your indexer that extracts text from the images embedded in the PDFs. The easiest way to do all of this (in just a couple of minutes) is to follow this tutorial : https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/search/cognitive-search-quickstart-blob By the end of that quickstart, you will have an index that you can query so you can find any PDFs that meet the query requirements. Thanks, Luis Cabrera, Azure Cognitive Search Team