Searching

The portal's search page, the site's front page (/), has two search modes.

Books

Searches each book's title, romanised title, authors (both scripts), subjects, series, publisher, description and the first few pages of text. Results show cover, author, year, language and page count, with matches highlighted.

  • Filters (left): Collection (the library's own collections), Type (book, periodical, thesis…), Language, Decade, Subject, Author and Source collection (the archive.org collection), plus a Year range. Filters combine: pick Kannada and 1950s to get Kannada books from the 1950s.
  • Sort: relevance, oldest, newest, title A–Z.
  • Empty search lists everything, which is useful for browsing by filter.

Inside the text

Searches the OCR text of every page of every book. Each result is a page, with a highlighted snippet. Clicking it opens the book at that page, with the same words searched inside the book.

On a book's page, Search inside this book lists every matching page. Click one to jump the reader there.

Kannada and other Indian scripts

  • Type in the script (ಕನ್ನಡ, हिन्दी, …) or in the romanised form when the record has one: hampi finds ಹಂಪಿ… books whose romanised title is on record.
  • The search engine tolerates small typos. That helps with OCR noise, but very short words and heavily damaged scans will still miss.
  • OCR quality varies with the age and print of the original. Research Desk shows what the Internet Archive's OCR produced; better OCR (see the roadmap) will improve results without changing anything here.

The address bar always reflects the current search, so you can bookmark or share it:

/?q=ವಚನ&mode=pages&language_label=Kannada&decade=1950s
/?creators=Kuvempu
/library/item/<identifier>?page=12&q=ಹಂಪಿ

Limits in this proof of concept

  • A search returns at most 10,000 hits (paged 20 at a time). Narrow with filters beyond that.
  • Phrase search ("exact words") and boolean operators in the portal are not exposed yet.
  • Meilisearch holds the page index in memory-mapped files. For collections beyond a few hundred thousand books, see Architecture → Scaling.