Like many others have suggested, local indexing is what I use for this, although some more natural interface may be better for structured search and querying.
What I haven't seen suggested though, is the built-in spotlight. Press CMD+Space, type some unique words that might appear in the document, and spotlight will search it. This also works surprisingly well for non-OCRd images of text, anything inside a zip file, an email, etc..
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Like many others have suggested, local indexing is what I use for this, although some more natural interface may be better for structured search and querying.
What I haven't seen suggested though, is the built-in spotlight. Press CMD+Space, type some unique words that might appear in the document, and spotlight will search it. This also works surprisingly well for non-OCRd images of text, anything inside a zip file, an email, etc..