Sustainable development requires the creation of sustainable innovation ideas (SIIs), but also that these ideas are selected and implemented into new products and services that are more sustainable than the products and services they substitute. Although the increasing use of online idea management system (IMS) enables firms to have more opportunities to search and develop SIIs, the survival of these ideas appears to be highly uncertain due to the diverse contributors and complex contributions to ideas. Arguably, effective organizing of the search of SIIs is potentially critical but firms face significant challenges to advance the searched SIIs across various innovation processes in online IMS due to the far limited extant knowledge. This study aims to explore the role of different online search patterns for SIIs. It does so through an empirical study based on data from an online IMS in a large Swedish company. On this basis, several types of analyses are performed in order to identify different types of SIIs and explicit search patterns, as well as the role of different explicit search patterns in the management of different SIIs. The results show that the different explicit search patterns along one or more different dimensions of sustainability have influence different types of SIIs differently. The study contributes to both the literature on innovation and sustainability, shedding new light for management on knowledge search patterns, and thereby offering potential improvements to the approaches used to manage SIIs in online IMS.