Help:Searching the ISFDB with an outside search engine

Several general search engines, such as Google, index some or all of the ISFDB's content. You can search the ISFDB by using one of these search engines. In general, such engines have a more sophisticated and powerful set of search capabilities, but they will not know anything about the detailed organization of the ISFDB's data. Furthermore, the captured indicies on which a search engine operates are likely to be some time out of date, probably anywhere from several days to several weeks, depending on when the engine last indexed (crawled) the ISFDB site. And depending on the precise methods that a particular engine uses, it may not index all records in the ISFDB in any case. On the other hand, an engine will index fields, such as the notes field, not directly searched by the ISFDB's web interface.

Google
To use Google to search the ISFDB specifically, you can use the Google "Advanced Search" feature. Click on "Advanced search" (to the right of the search term edit field). On the advanced search page, enter   in the "Search within a site or domain" edit field (located in the "Need more tools?" section). Then enter the rest of your search in the normal way in the other edit fields

Alternatively simply add   to the end of a search string in the regular Google edit box. This will restrict the Google search to the ISFDB, but otherwise leave the search unchanged. Click here to go to Google, and add what you are looking for to the search box.