Open Library now lets you search inside the text contents of over 4M books!

A Full-Text Search for “thanks for all the fish” on openlibrary.org

What’s Full-Text Search?

Many book websites, like Amazon and Goodreads, give you the ability to search for books by title and author, but they don’t make it easy to find books based on their contents. This type of searching is called “Full-Text Search”.

Try searching for “brewster kahle alexa internet” on Goodreads or Amazon:

A search for “brewster kahle alexa internet” on goodreads

A search for “brewster kahle alexa internet” on amazon books

Have you ever heard a quote and wished you could figure out which book it came from? Open Library full-text search gives readers the ability to locate books which reference any snippet of text like, “Let every thing have its place“:

A full-text search on openlibrary.org of “let every thing have its place”

Full-Text Search on Archive.org

I’ve been surprised to learn how many people didn’t know that Archive.org has had full-text search for several years — and its really powerful! In 2016, Giovanni Damiola (@giovannidamiola) led a major overhaul of Internet Archive’s full-text search system and unlocked the ability for users to perform full-text searches across almost 40M unique text documents — from patents, to yearbooks, to open-access research papers.

How to activate Full-Text Search mode on Archive.org

Full-Text Search of the quote “let every thing have its place” on Archive.org

Open Library Full-Text Search

When you search across 40M documents, it can be a challenge to find the one you’re looking for. One feature which Open Library has been missing is a way to limit Internet Archive’s full-text search to only include results from books on Open Library. So for the last two years, Open Library has patiently waited to take full advantage of full-text search for its users.

Earlier this week, Gio released an improvement to our full-text search engine which lets us get around this historical limitation — and so we jumped on this opportunity to improve our search on openlibrary.org! With the help of Razzi Abuissa, Open Library volunteer, and Mek, Open Library’s project lead, you can now search inside more than 4M Open Library books.

Try a Full-Text Search

Thanks for all the fish! …Wait, what book was that from again?