Google looks for your search word in the title and other descriptive information about a book as well as in the actual text of that book to find results.
The amount of a book you can see varies. Some (usually older) books can be read in full, some will let you see a preview of part of the book, some will only show short snippets of the book based on your search terms, and some will only have descriptive information about the book.
The advanced search gives you additional options with searching, including limiting to books by what you can see; searching only the title, author, publisher, or subject of a book; searching by publication dates; and searching by ISBN.
You can organize books you find into a personal library with a Google account.
Advanced search has options for controlling where in a book different search words are located.
You can read whole books if they are in the public domain, meaning they are not protected under copyright. For other books you can only read descriptive information and search for page numbers of search words.
Part of the Internet Archive, an open catalog designed to create descriptive information for every book every published.
Access to books varies. Some cannot be read on OpenLibrary, though information on how to find the book in a library is often included. Some books are available free because they are in the public domain. Others can be borrowed for free with an OpenLibrary account.
Search looks in all of the descriptive information for the book such as title, author, subject, and publisher. The advanced search allows you to pick what part of the descriptive information is searched.
The full-text search looks for your search words inside of books.
WorldCat searches library collections across the world to find books as well as DVDs, CDs, and other items collected by libraries.
For each result, you can input a zip code to find libraries near you with the material.
From the results page, you can limit your results by format, author, language, content, year of publication, audience, and subject.
The advanced search lets you search specific information such as by author or ISBN number, as well as many of the same limiting options as the results page.
You can create lists of materials you find with a free account.
BASE (Bielefeld Academic Search Engine) searches only for academic sources, such as journal articles, preprints, digital collections, images, videos and research data.
About 60% of results are Open Access (free of charge), and at least some material in a source needs to be available Open Access to be included in BASE search.
Any source searched by BASE has to be reviewed for academic quality before it will be included.
Built on Google search but prioritizes information it considers more appropriate for school assignments, such as encyclopedias, news sources, university websites, museum & other cultural institution websites, & government sources.
Can search definitions, images, and books
Document search looks for non-HTML formats such as PDFs and Office documents.
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