Internet Archive Search for Books and Documents

What Is on the Internet Archive?

The Internet Archive is a nonprofit digital library based in San Francisco, founded in 1996. Alongside the Wayback Machine, it holds millions of scanned books and texts, plus old magazines, government reports, manuals, audio, video and software.

Every item has its own page at archive.org/details, with the files for that item listed underneath. Many books can be read or downloaded for free, and some newer ones can only be borrowed.

Why Search the Internet Archive Through Google?

Archive.org's own search matches on titles and the descriptions uploaders write, and those are often thin or misspelled. Google and Bing read the whole item page and rank items by how many sites link to them, so they tend to surface the well-known copy first.

Archive.org can also search inside the text of scanned books. Use the search text contents option on its own search page when you are after a phrase from inside a book rather than the book itself.

Tips for Better Results

1. Add the author's last name and a year to tell editions apart.
2. Put a word like manual, catalog or report in the title field under More filters.
3. Try Bing too. It indexes a different slice of archive.org items.

For free classic books in EPUB, the ebook search engine adds Project Gutenberg and Open Library. To search a single collection of scanned public records, try government document search.