Help: Search

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When you know exactly what you're looking for, using the search box can be the fastest way to find it.
On every page, you'll notice that our search box is available. Where it'll search for content though, is purely contextual.
Browsing public domain books ? Then the search box will look for public domain books/authors (the "Discover" section). You just clicked on the tag of an amateur book ? It'll search for amateur books in this case (the "Share" section).


You can easily switch from one to another using the tabs (UI Help) that you can see at the top of this page. It'll keep your keywords and make the exact same search in another section.


The search feature is quite flexible and advanced. You can do a lot more than just search for the name of a book or of an author. For example if you're looking for the name of an author, it'll also display some of his books. If you're searching for "horror" you'll find the book with horror in their titles first, but it'll also list books with "Horror" in their list of types.
Here's a list of things you can look for in a book (by order of priority) in the "Discover" section:

• Title
• Author
• Type (for example: Romance)
• Year it was published
• Language

For an author the list is:

• Surname/First Name
• Bibliography (one of his/her book's title)

You don't need to type the exact name of a book/author. For example while looking for Dostoyevsky, french people would spell it Dostoievski instead. In both cases, the search system will find the author.

Searching for...

• The Art of War will look for all of these 4 words in any field and in any order
• "The Art of War" will look for a full sentence instead of 4 separate words
• Art OR War will look for any element that contains Art or War
• language:"en" will look for anything in english. You can also use type: for the type of the book (Science Fiction, Romance etc...), author: to specify an author or year: to specify the year
• +art means that the result must have the word art in one of its fields
• -art will exclude every result with the word art in one of its fields

For example if you're looking for a science fiction book in english with the word time you'll use: type:"Science Fiction" language:"en" +time

Most of the time, whenever we list something on Feedbooks, you can also filter (UI Help) what's listed.
For "Discover" you'll notice these filters:


Understanding how this works is very easy: you can switch between displaying books, authors or both.
If you're not looking for the most relevant search, but the most popular one instead (based on downloads), you can also reorder the list.

On the right of the page, you'll notice 2 actions (UI Help) for Google.
Google's behavior is very different from our own search system. While our search system looks for items directly in our database, Google looks for keywords in our pages instead. This mean that Google will return as a result everything that's written on the website (comments or descriptions for example).
Let's see exactly what these 2 actions will return:

• Results on Google
  Basic Google search. Will return anything written in "Discover" or "Share".
  
  
• Results on Google (PDF)
  Very interesting feature. Google can look for text in PDF files and keep our PDF files in cache.
  Using this link, you can search for anything that's in our e-books. Got a quote and looking for the right book ? Using this link Google will return the A4 PDF file corresponding to this book.
  This feature can be very useful in many cases, and a good way to discover new books too (for example you can look for books with the word "vampire" in it, instead of reading Dracula over and over again).

In most modern web browsers (Firefox or IE7 for example), you can add search engines directly inside your browser.
For those of you frequently looking for content on Feedbooks, this might be the best way to search for something. On any page you can click on the search engine icon of your browser to list those search engines and add them to your browser. You'll notice that a search engine for public domain content is available, and another one for amateur content too.


These search boxes will redirect you to the usual search page on our website.