File Search & Auditor for Google Drive™

Search every Google Drive™ you have access to — and find out who else has access too.

File Search & Auditor for Google Drive™ (the "App") is a Google Workspace™ Add-on that searches across all your Google Shared Drives™ (and optionally your personal My Drive) for files matching a search string, and writes the results to a Google Sheets™ spreadsheet — including the dates, file types, sharing permissions, and a flag for files shared externally.

The App is a reporting tool, built for people who need to know where something lives in their Drive estate and who can see it. Useful for tidying up after departed contractors, auditing what's been shared with personal Gmail addresses, or just finding that one file someone swears exists somewhere in the company drives.

View on GitHub Privacy Policy Terms of Service

What It Does

Searches across all your Shared Drives at once — auto-discovers every Shared Drive you have access to, then lets you tick which ones to include.
Full-text or title-only search — find files by content, exact phrase ("Q3 budget"), or title only (title:budget).
Files, folders, or both — pick what you want to find with simple checkboxes.
Reports who has access — every result row lists the named users and groups with permissions on the file.
Flags external sharing — files shared with "Anyone with the link" or with users outside your organisation are flagged so you can spot them at a glance.
Clickable file links — open any file directly from the results sheet to review or update its sharing settings in Drive.
Works on consumer Gmail too — if you don't have Shared Drives, it falls back to a simple "Search My Drive" mode.

How to Install

The App is currently distributed as an open-source Apps Script project. Full installation steps are in the README on GitHub. The short version:

Create a new Google Sheets spreadsheet.
Open Extensions → Apps Script.
Copy the contents of listFilesFound.gs, searchInput.html, css.html, and appsscript.json from the repo.
Enable the Drive API advanced service (Services → Drive API → v3).
Reload the spreadsheet — the File Search menu will appear.

A Google Workspace™ Marketplace edition is in development — once published, it'll be installable in one click.

Editions

Community edition (current)

Open-source, manually installed, with the full feature set including external-sharing detection. Uses Google's drive.readonly scope to support full-text content search.

Marketplace Pro edition (in development)

One-click install via the Google Workspace™ Marketplace, with the narrower drive.metadata.readonly scope (no file content access). Plus Pro features:

Permission mining with a dedicated audit view
Organisation-aware risk detection (proper external-user flagging)
Scheduled snapshots — re-run searches every 24 hours and track what's changed
Bulk permission remediation — revoke access for a specific user across many files at once

About permissions: The Community edition requests Google's drive.readonly scope, which lets it read any file in your Drive and any Shared Drive you have access to. It's read-only — it can't modify, move, or delete anything — and all processing happens inside your own Google account. Nothing is sent anywhere external. The full code is open-source so you can verify exactly what it does. The forthcoming Marketplace edition will use the narrower drive.metadata.readonly scope, which avoids file content access entirely. Read more about why these scopes are needed.

Privacy & Data

The App does not transmit, store, or share any data outside of your Google account. All searching, processing, and reporting happens entirely within Google Apps Script™ — there are no external servers, no databases, and no third-party services involved. See the Privacy Policy for full details.

Support

For questions, bug reports, or feature requests, please open an issue on the GitHub repository.

File Search & Auditor for Google Drive™ is an independent open-source project. Google Drive™, Google Sheets™, Google Workspace™, and Google Apps Script™ are trademarks of Google LLC. The App is not affiliated with or endorsed by Google LLC.