This article covers a free search engine to find books from Open Library. Open Library is an online project with the intended purpose to have all the books ever published in one place. This is a project of Wayback Machine Internet Archive. Not all books are available to read in the Open Library but are indexed to help you find related content and links.
Book Search is a search engine that lets you search books across a 28 Million database of books from OpenLibrary. It is powered by an open-source search-engine called Typesense. This is a typo-tolerant search engine means you can type fuzzy words to find relevant books.
Also read: 5 Internet Archive Wayback Machine Alternative Websites Free
Free Search Engine to Find Books from Open Library
Book Search is built using the Typesense Adapter for InstantSearch.js. It is hosted on S3, with CloudFront for a CDN. Currently, the dataset has around 28 million records. All this takes up to 6.8 GB of disk space and Typesense indexed all this data using 14.3 GB of RAM in around 3 hours.
It is simple to use. You get a search bar at the top where you can type a book title or author name to get the results. Below the search bar, it also suggests some of the popular authors that you can try within a click to see how it all works.
When you run a query, this returns with the matching results. If you searched for an author then it shows all the books by that author. And, if you searched a title then it shows all the books with matching titles. You get search filters on the left of the screen. These search filters allow you to narrow down the results based on subject and author.
You can click the title of the book to visit the same on Open Library. Many books also have a link to the Amazon book store in case you like to purchase a published copy.
Closing Words
This is a handy search experience that indexes all the datasets of books from Open Library. You can easily find any book by its title or author and the results are fast and accurate.
