I have written an addin program that works with NanoCAD (a free compatible program with full AutoCAD-- at least for two dimensions) that can be set to open and extract text, mtext, attribute and embedded text from all dwg files that match a given pattern or pattern, and are located below a root folder on your computer. The extracted texts go into a database that can be searched. All found instances of a word or words are listed. You can click on an item to open the drawing and zoom to the text.
What is this good for? It is great when you have hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of drawings, and you want to cut and paste details that you drew earlier, or that any of your colleagues have drawn. Who can remember where all those details are when you want to use them again? You may not even know that there are details your colleagues have drawn that you would want to use.
Why NanoCAD? It is free, so I figured that more people would have access to it. You can download NanoCAD 5.0 from nanocad.com.
Why not AutoCAD? It is not free, but if someone is really interested, I can recompile the program to use with AutoCAD-- for a fee.
Where can it be downloaded from? ncadaddons.tumpliner.com
What is the catch? I have a little spiel about the ethics of group interaction that I would like you to read and click to accept before using the program. I do not think it should be objectionable, but I think the data should be better known.

The copy I had up on the website for download was not working. I have it fixed as of 6/22/15, Monday. If you have downloaded it before, I apologize. Please try downloading it again.

One can basically search AutoCAD drawings using name, location, date filters, keywords, etc. using the methods described in the link below that references AutoCAD 2010...

http://docs.autodesk.com/ACD/2010/ENU/AutoCAD%202010%20User%20Documentation/index.html?url=WS1a9193826455f5ffa23ce210c4a30acaf-7865.htm,topicNumber=d0e19554

So as to your offer to recompile your nanoCAD lisp specific program to work in AutoCAD, for a fee, I say "Thanks, but no thanks."


Edited by John Connor - 24.Jun.2015 at 18:34

Also, I would guess that the Microsoft Search would be EXTREMELY slow for searching tens of thousands of drawings. DwgCrawler is indexed, so the results are almost instantaneous once you have crawled the data. Also, like I suggested, you can use it as freeware if you download and install a free copy of NanoCAD. Then just use NanoCAD when you need to search on something.

Of course both Windows Search and AutoCAD Content Center use indexed data to find the searched DWG faster. Plus, neither NanoCAD nor other AutoCAD clone (fake) fully understands the DWG format and all its objects so your drawing entities could be misinterpreted.