Search inside scanned pages
search_insideSearch full text of digitized books, newspapers, and documents on the Internet Archive to find phrases even when metadata lacks them. Use quoted phrases for exact matches and page through results.
Instructions
Search the text inside digitised books, newspapers and documents on the Internet Archive. This reads what optical recognition took off the scanned pages, so it finds a phrase that appears nowhere in a title or a catalogue record. Put a phrase in double quotes to hold the words together in that order. The index folds accents, case and punctuation before it matches, so the letters are not held: a quoted "bûcher" comes back on pages printing Bücher and Bucher. Read an excerpt before repeating a quoted query as the spelling a page carries. Without quotes the words are matched separately, which finds far more. 'total' counts the documents that match, and they page: ask for page 2, 3 and so on to see beyond the first answer. It is not a count of how many times the phrase occurs. The index reports no page number, so a match names the item and the passage, never a leaf. Follow source_url and search the item to find where the passage sits. When 'inside_container' is true the passage came from a document bundled inside the item, and the title, creator and year describe the container rather than the text that matched: read 'matched_file' for what actually holds it. Use search_items or search_books instead when looking for a work by its title, author or subject.
Input Schema
| Name | Required | Description | Default |
|---|---|---|---|
| page | No | Which page of matches, from 1. Paging stops at 100. | |
| limit | No | Matches to return. | |
| query | Yes | Words or a quoted phrase, such as '"call me ishmael"'. | |
| max_excerpt_chars | No | Budget for one passage. Read it together with 'max_excerpts_per_match': the size of the answer is the product of the two and the number of matches. | |
| max_excerpts_per_match | No | Passages to keep per match. The index finds several in a long work, and the later ones rarely say anything the first did not. |
Output Schema
| Name | Required | Description | Default |
|---|---|---|---|
| hits | Yes | ||
| page | Yes | ||
| notes | Yes | ||
| query | Yes | ||
| total | Yes | Documents that match, not the number returned and not a count of occurrences. Raise 'page' to read further into it. |