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Search Tips

The search function on FanworksFinder.com looks simplistic, but it's actually very powerful—and easy to use. You have five tools available to you when using the search box:

Plus signs
Minus signs
Quotation marks
Search codes (very useful!)
Wildcards
No symbols
Category drop-down box

Plus signs
A plus sign in front of a word "This word must be in all of the search results returned." So, a search for Sparrow Norrington would return all results that have either Sparrow OR Norrington (or both) in them while a search for +Sparrow +Norrington would only return those results that have both characters in them.

Important! You need to put the plus sign up against the search term; if you leave a space between the sign and the term, the sign will be ignored.

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Minus signs
A minus sign in front of a word means "This word must not be in any of the search results returned." For instance, if you don't want fanfics hosted on fanfiction.net, use -fanfiction.net. If you want CSI but not CSI: Miami, use +CSI -Miami.

Important! You need to put the minus sign up against the search term; if you leave a space between the sign and the term, the sign will be ignored.

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Quotation marks
Enclose search terms of two or more words within quotation marks to force the search engine to treat the group of words as a single search term. For instance, if you're looking for Nightmare Before Christmas fanfic and you don't enclose Nightmare Before Christmas in quotation marks, the search will treat each word as a separate search term—and you'll get listings for "Nightmare On Elm Street," "Land Before Time," and "A Christmas Wish" in your search results.

Pairings tip! If you want to search for a pairing that's separated by a slash (Merry/Pippin), you need to enclose the pairing in quotation marks ("Merry/Pippin"). If you want to search for stories containing one half of a pairing, simply include the slash, put it in quotes, and leave off the second half of the pairing. ("Merry/" or "/Merry").

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NEW! Search codes!
Now you can specify that a search term must come from a certain field. It's easy! Just put the search code right up against the front of your search term. Here are the available codes:

Be sure that you put the code right up against the search term or it won't work.

Correct: f:house
Incorrect: f: house orf : house or f :house

Feel free to mix search-coded terms with other search-coded terms and/or with nonsearch-coded terms.

f:house +cane
f:potc "black pearl" p:sparrow

If you have a search-coded term that's two or more words, don't use quotation marks. Use multiple codes instead:

Correct: f:boston f:legal
Incorrect: f:"Boston Legal"

Finally, there's no need to put a plus sign (+) in front of a search code; the search code will "require" the term to be in every record returned. A minus sign (-) in front of a search code will have no affect.

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Wildcard
Wildcard searches are tricky but doable. Use the asterisk (*) when you want to find all results that match the first part of a word. For instance, if you want to find all authors with "kasia" in their name, use kasia*—this will return "Kasia," "Kasia Faai," "KasiaNoodle," etc. You can also use the asterisk in the middle of a search term: kas*a.

Wildcard issues: 1) The wild card down not work at the beginning of a search term—it will be ignored and a regular search will be performed on the term (it would treat "*asia" as "asia," for instance, and only find exact matches for "asia"). 2) The wildcard doesn't work in search terms enclosed by quotation marks. ("Jack/*" returns nothing. BUT "Jack/" (in quotes) acts just like Jack/*, so doing a search for one character paired with any other does work.) 3) If you use the wildcard in a search that has several terms (+potc +anna*), the plus signs get ignored and you'll receive results that have any (instead of all) of the terms in them.

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No symbols
When you put nothing in front of or around search terms, the search engine plays fast and loose with those words, returning results that have at least one—but not necessarily all—of the words you've typed in.

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Category drop-down box
Self-explanatory.

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Save your searches!

If you find yourself running the same search every time you visit the site, you might want to save it. It's easy to do--just run a search and you'll see a "Like these results?" box at the top of your search results. Give your search a name and click "& save it!"

Next time you want to run that search, instead of typing in the search terms, just click on that search in the Saved Searches box in the right sidebar. (You can also go to Your Stuff and choose Searches.) All of your saved searches will be listed there with three options: "All results," "New results only," and "delete search."

"New results only" brings up only listings that have been added since the last time you ran that search from the saved searches area. "All results" brings up all listings that meet the search criteria.

New: now you can get an RSS feed of your saved searches. Just click the in the Saved Searches box in the right sidebar.

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Help improve searches

Search results can only be as good as the data in the database. That's why FanworksFinder.com takes a wiki-like approach to its listings: any logged-in user can edit any listing. Just click the green "Edit listing" link in any listing to open up the edit page for that listing. There you can add tags and genres, correct misspellings, add character and pairing information and more.

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