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Life & fun · December 14, 2020

Instantly search 28M books from OpenLibrary

Books Search with Typesense

Instantly search 28M books from OpenLibrary launched on December 14, 2020 with 424 votes, #21 of 3,242 launches that month and more than 99% of that year's launches. The site was still online in September 2026, 5 years on.

In plain words

This tool lets users search across 28 million books indexed from OpenLibrary, providing fast access to a massive catalog of literary works. It's designed for readers and researchers who need to find books quickly without navigating multiple databases. The search functionality leverages Typesense technology to deliver instant results from one of the largest open book collections available online.

written from the facts on this page · September 2026

From the sources

This search experience is powered by Typesense which is a blazing-fast, open source typo-tolerant search-engine. It is an open source alternative to Algolia and an easier-to-use alternative to ElasticSearch. The books dataset is from Open Library which is an initiative of the Internet Archive. Please contribute books metadata if you're able to. The app was built using the Typesense Adapter for InstantSearch.js and is hosted on S3, with Cloudfront for a CDN. The search backend is powered by a geo-distributed 3-node Typesense cluster running on Typesense Cloud , with nodes in Oregon, Frankfurt and Mumbai. Here is the source-code that shows you how to build your own search experience like this…from books-search.typesense.org

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