ghacks Technology News

Using Google to find free Ebooks

By using the knowledge we gained from previous articles on how to find mp3 files using the Google search engine we will be able to easily find other files as well using almost the same search techniques.

The main ebook format is .pdf, but ebooks also are delivered as .chm, doc and even .txt format. That means we will have to include at least pdf, doc and chm to get good results in our searches. Ebooks are unfortunately sometimes packed, that means you probably would like to include zip and rar as well to your search

(pdf|chm|doc|txt|zip|rar)

To get good results we need to exclude the following -inurl:htm -inurl:html

To search for directories that contain ebooks you use the following search string.

-inurl:htm -inurl:asp -inurl:html (“index of|"last modified"|"parent of") AND ("ebook"|"ebooks"|"book"|"books") AND (pdf|chm|doc|txt|zip|rar) AND "Oct-2005"

You should really add another keyword, a title, author or publisher to get better results than that general search. Simply add the keyword at the end of your search using +”keyword”

Update: Here are explanations for the commands listed on this page:

  • -inurl:htm -inurl:asp -inurl:html (This one forces the search engine to only include pages in the results that do not have htm, asp or html in their urls.
  • (“index of|”last modified”|”parent of”) AND (“ebook”|”ebooks”|”book”|”books”) AND (pdf|chm|doc|txt|zip|rar) AND “Oct-2005″ (a large command with several operators tied together. It basically tells Google to only include pages in the results that contain at least one phrase of each, for instance index of AND ebook AND pdf AND Oct-2005.

You can naturally modify the parameters to suite your needs better. You could for instance change the date, remove a phrase or add a new file extension to the mix for more versatility.

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Related Articles:

Using Google to find Free Mp3 files
Using Google to find Free Mp3 files 2
Using Google to find Movies
How To Download Google Books Ebooks
Guten Reader, Read 18000 Gutenberg ebooks



About the Author:Martin Brinkmann is a journalist from Germany who founded Ghacks Technology News Back in 2005. He is passionate about all things tech and knows the Internet and computers like the back of his hand. You can follow Martin on Facebook or Twitter.

Author: , Sunday October 9, 2005 -
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Responses so far:

  1. arn01d says:

    Cool,
    THANKS!!!!!!!!!!

  2. afs says:

    AND (“ebook”|”ebooks”|”book”|”books”)
    ? dont do that ! some eBook files say that they are not ebooks !!!

  3. Robyn says:

    I think you created a beautiful site, which is really interesting as well. I enjoy visiting it every week. Thank you!

  4. brow says:

    I don’t understand it……cant get it working

  5. 1.4. The 10-Word Limit
    Unless you’re fond of long, detailed queries, you might never have noticed that Google has a hard limit of 10 words—that’s keywords and special syntaxes combined—ignoring anything beyond. While this has no real effect on casual Google users, search hounds quickly find that this limit rather cramps their style.

  6. 1.4. The 10-Word Limit
    Unless you’re fond of long, detailed queries, you might never have noticed that Google has a hard limit of 10 words—that’s keywords and special syntaxes combined—ignoring anything beyond. While this has no real effect on casual Google users, search hounds quickly find that this limit rather cramps their style…… dude read it in “PC HACKS” .. O’reilly Publishers…

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