To start a search, click inside the search box at the top of the middle column and start typing your search term. As you type, Zotero will reduce the total number of items in the center column to only those that contain your search term.

With basic searches, Zotero combs through all of your data for results. For example, a basic search for 1979 will return a wide variety of items. The search would return books with 1979 in their title, items published in 1979, items tagged 1979, and websites that have 1979 somewhere in their full text. In short, basic searches search through all your data.

When you have a very large collection, the basic search function's “as you type” search abilities can start to slow things down a bit. To mitigate this effect you can place your search term in quotes. To demonstrate, when you type 1979 into the basic search box you are actually doing four individual searches. Once you hit “1”, Zotero refines your view in the center column to include only items with 1 in them, then after you hit “9”, Zotero executes a new search and now displays only items that have 19 in them, and so on. Now, if you had started your search with a quotation mark, Zotero will not complete the search until you again enter a quotation mark. So now if you type “1974” Zotero will only execute a single search.