Download product manuals from Amazon
The Internet is a great place to find product related information, instructions, tutorials and even full scanned manuals which are usually provided in pdf format. What many Internet users may not know is that one of the world's largest online shopping sites hosts thousands upon thousands of manuals and guides on its servers. I'm talking about Amazon, and the main reason you may not have heard about that is that you can't really access those manuals directly when you are browsing the Amazon store or using the store's search to find products you are interested in.
Taking a look at product manuals and guides can not only be beneficial if you are already owning the device, but also if you consider buying it but need to know first it if supports a feature that you require your new device to ship with.
We are using a search engine like Google Search or Bing Search to find the manuals. To do so, you need to use the following search phrase:
filetype:pdf site:images-amazon.com
The command above finds all manuals that the search engine knows about that are hosted on the Amazon server listed above. Google for instance returns 60,000 results, Bing 16,600 which all link to pdf manuals hosted on Amazon.
While it is great to find all of those manuals hosted on Amazon, you may want to refine the search to find manuals for products that you are interested in. To do so, simply add part or all of the product name to the query.
Canon EOS filetype:pdf site:images-amazon.com
The query above lists only manuals for Canon EOS cameras and equipment. The size of the manuals and guides varies highly. Some browsers, like Chrome, display the contents of the manual directly on a page, while others download the documents to the local computer instead. Reading the pdf in the browser is probably the better option if you need to look up information quickly. If you lost your original manual or want to have access to a manual whenever you need it, it is better to save it to your computer so that you do not have to re-download it every time you need to access it.
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There is a lot of other stuff that gets picked up, including ebooks, preview chapters, interviews, promotional/sales material, and basically anything hosted on g-ecx.images-amazon.com…
I’ve posted an search engine installer for searching this Amazon manuals library on Mycroft: http://mycroft.mozdev.org/search-engines.html?name=Product+Manuals+on+Amazon
Just click the Product Manuas on Amazon link and Firefox (and probably other browsers too) will ask to install this search engine. Once installed you can just enter your search term and forget about the filetype:pdf site:images-amazon.com part.
They did not have my bread machine when I looked it up this morning. Darn it.
Wonderful info, Martin! Thanks!
P.S.: In “it is better to safe it to your computer”, “safe” should be “save”.
Thanks, corrected it.
Thanks. Very useful info.
Thanks Martin, great article.
bob
Even better: The same query works on DuckDuckGo
This is really useful!
Thanks for this article :)
Thanks Martin, good article.
Thanks,
Grr
Thank you Martin, this is a very useful article.
Incidently, on the camera equipment theme, for checking out new products I can recommend the reviews over at dpreview.com, very thorough testing and reliable information
It is about time all manufacturer discard the CD and paper manuals, they are a waste of paper and plastics.
microUSB cables should be the default connection and charging port for all hardware, this will save more money as manufacturer don’t need to ship any cables.