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Find anything
One search box covers your whole library: titles and authors, the text inside your books and papers, your highlights and your notes. In Local mode it can also find passages by what they mean, not just the words they use.
Search everything
Open Search from the rail (or press Ctrl+Shift+S) and type. Results arrive in groups:
- Lists, Collections, Domains, Authors and Series that match, so you can jump straight there.
- Notes: your notes and book notebooks.
- Books, papers and documents, each with the passages that matched.
Choose a passage to open the book at that exact place. Ctrl+click opens it in a new tab and keeps your results.
By keyword and by meaning
Each result shows how it matched:
| Badge | Means |
|---|---|
| Metadata | The title, author, subject or other details matched. |
| Text | Your words appear in the book's text. |
| Semantic | A passage is about what you asked, even if it uses different words. |
| Annotation | One of your highlights or highlight notes matched. |
Search by meaning is what finds "how animals keep their balance" in a passage about the base of support and centre of mass. It works on the text of PDFs and EPUBs in Local mode, once you've added a semantic model and turned on Semantic Search for your folders. It isn't available for synced libraries yet.
Narrow it down
Two sets of filters refine a search:
- Result type: Books, Papers, Documents or Notes.
- Search in: Metadata, Text or Annotations.
Choosing nothing in a set means all of it.
What gets searched
| What | Keyword | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| Titles, authors, subjects, tags | ✓ | |
| Text of PDFs and EPUBs | ✓ | ✓ |
| Your highlights and highlight notes | ✓ | |
| Your notes | ✓ |
Titles, authors and your own records are searched on your computer and work offline. In Local mode, book text is searched on your computer too, once Full-Text Search is on for its folder. With sync on, searching inside book text needs a connection.
Search within a book
Inside the reader, search finds every place a word appears in that book. To search a whole Collection, use the search box in the Collection itself.
Next: How AI works in Xandria