hey you! do you have that one line of fanfic that’s stuck in your head that you can’t figure out what fic it came from? I have news for you! there is a way that you can search for it, provided you have an idea about what site it was on (ff.net works the absolute best for this, as they don’t have any viewer limitations on fic like ao3 does. most fandom specific archives also work great with this. You can use it for AO3, but I can’t guarantee great results for all queries on that one lol). Buckle in for a somewhat long post under the cut! Might be a little technical on terminology -- so if something I’m saying doesn’t make sense, feel free to shoot me an ask.
Google search (and duckduckgo search) has an operator you can use to limit your search to a single website or second or top level domain. This is useful for a lot of reasons. In this instance we’re going to be using the site: operator to limit our search to ao3 or ff.net.
Side note: This operator doesn’t work as well with websites that have been set up such that they cannot be cached/crawled by google search (you can do this with your tumblr blog for example using the “hide yourblog from search” toggle in blog settings”.) There are various reasons why you (or any other website owner) might want to keep your site hidden from search results (or other kinds of web crawlers, like those from the internet archive’s wayback machine). That said, for a majority of sites this is not the case, as the site owners want their site to be findable in web searches.
Moving on.
The site operator is pretty simple: when making a search, you append site:mysite.com to the end of your search (or stick in the beginning, the search engine’s not picky) which tells the search engine to limit results to ONLY that particular site. This will also work for second level domains AND top level domains. (for example, limiting your search results to only .edu sites is possible with the site operator by typing site:.edu in your search. you can also do a second+top level domain combo that still isn’t a full site address to search through a network of sites, like all of the smithsonian museum sites, which all end with .si.ed, so they can all be concurrently searched by adding site:.si.edu to your query).
For the purposes of this activity, we’ll be using this to search archive of our own.
[image ID: screenshot of a search box with with site:archiveofourown.org typed into it. /end ID]
For our next trick we’re going to add our fic line. To make sure that the search engine searches for the exact line in the exact order that we type it, we’ll surround the line with double quotes to make our search a verbatim string search. Make sure that you do not include punctuation like !, : or ? as those characters can have operative meanings (meaning that they are used to perform some kind of search operator.) in some search engines. Thus the search becomes:
[image ID: screenshot of a search box with “his child in chains” site:archiveofourown.org typed into it. /end ID]
Great! But what if I also remember the fandom? Good news, you can use that double quotes trick again in the same search search to tell the search engine that you want only results that contain your quote AND the fandom. You’ll do this by adding a second phrase to the search, also surrounded by double quotes. This works because on AO3 and ff.net, the fandom appears in the header of every chapter of the fic. Thus the search becomes:
[image ID: screenshot of a search box with “his child in chains” “star wars” site:archiveofourown.org typed into it. /end ID]
The above search tells my search engine to return only results that are from archiveofourown.org, and contain “star wars” and my quote “his child in chains”. This will return to me the fic Of Queens Knights and Pawns, which is the fic I was looking for! Unfortunately for you, if you’ve misremembered the quote or the site, you’re not going to get what you’re looking for. That said, another way that you can further limit your search is by adding character names, also in double quotes to the search.
Another note to be aware of: Because of the way that relevancy metrics work in search engines, you may not actually get the closest match for your search as the top result, since google (for ex) prioritizes things like “most recently updated”, “most visited”, “most linked to from other sites” etc. All this means that is more recent and more popular fics will likely show up first, even if they match less of your terms. For older fics especially it can be more difficult for the search engine to actually dredge them up because some of the descriptive data that more modern pages use (that the search engine is trained look for) wasn’t in use in the same way or format (or even at all, depending on page age) at the time of posting.
All that said, I hope this little guide helps you out some. You can also apply this to your research related google searches
