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Advanced AO3 Search Tips
AO3 has a really amazing tagging system. It's so good that it blows all previous methods of finding fanworks out of the water.
But that means that when it fails - when there's something it doesn't work for - it can be really really frustrating and you end up wanting to burn the entire thing to the ground.
But. There are other methods! And some of them still work even when tag search doesn't.
So here are my top 10 tips for ways to find what you need when AO3's tagging system has failed you. With real-life examples!
For when you want to read fic that is about a thing, but most of the fic tagged with the thing isn’t actually about the thing:
1) Hidden Search Operators
There are a bunch of extra search tools you can use in the “search within results” field at the bottom of the filters sidebar. Most of them just duplicate what the options in the filters do, but there’s a few searches that can only be done using the extra search tools. They're all listed in Hidden Search Operators post. That post also has some instructions fro using the "search within results" field more powerfully in general, and if you're at all interested in advanced AO3 searches, it's worth reading.
The two hidden search operators I use regularly are:
The secret OTP code: if you put "otp: true" in "search within results", the search will return only works tagged with exactly one ship. If you’re also filtering on a ship, you will get only works with only that ship and no others.
This is great when you want to read a pairing that is often tagged as a minor pairing on works that are mostly about larger ships. It’s also great for dealing with those "drabble collections" that are tagged with every ship on the Archive.
It’s not perfect, because it will also filter out stories where your ship is the major ship and a minor ship was also tagged, but it can save a lot of trouble on filtering out all the fandom’s other ships one by one.
For example, if I want Pepper Potts/Tony Stark fic that is actually about Pepper Potts/Tony Stark and not about how Tony is actually happier with someone else or where they're just background wallpaper, I can filter on Pepper Potts/Tony Stark in relationships and otp:true in "search within" and get 2400 works where they are the only ship, as opposed to the 12000 mostly Steve/Tony and Steve/Bucky works that come up without that filter on.
Summary search: If you put “summary: foo” in “search within results”, it will search for “foo” in only the summary field. This is great for the equivalent situation where your favorite character is often tagged for having one line in a work, and you want stories that are actually about them.
Filter on the character’s canonical tag, to make sure you’re getting the right character, and then add a summary search for the character’s first name (or equivalent), and you’ll get only stories that actually mention them in the summary. This one has been life-changing for me since I discovered it earlier this week. :D
You can use this for other story elements that are likely to come up in the summary but are often not helpfully tagged, too!
For example, if I want stories about Rhodey Rhodes, and not just stories where he shows up for one scene to help his white best friend, I can filter on James "Rhodey" Rhodes in characters, and then put 'summary: Rhodey' in search within and ... okay, I still get a couple stories where he's a minor character, but my odds are much, much better.
2) Bookmarkers' Tags
You can go to the bookmark search page or a bookmark filter and search only bookmarkers’ tags. This can be helpful in cases where the authors in a fandom are not very good at tagging in ways that are helpful for readers - bookmarkers are tagging from a reader’s POV, and tend to be better at this. And, of course, you will only find stories that at least one person cared enough to bookmark.
You may also stumble on a bookmarker who has a personal bookmark for exactly the thing you’re looking for, which is like a miracle from above when it happens.
The downside is that bookmarker tags are relatively rare - the search functions that make them easy to use are sort of new, and there really isn’t a critical mass of people tagging their bookmarks well in a lot of fandoms. But if more people know about the functionality, more hopefully more people will use it!
I used this a lot more often before I discovered Summary search, but here's the bookmarkers' tags search for James "Rhodey" Rhodes - it narrows down the list even more, but increases the quality a little.
You can also use it to put your own personal tags on works you want to be able to find later - this is the solution to things like “my ‘read later’ list is too much of a mess to use”; you can use bookmark tags instead. And this is a good use-case for tumblr-style tags, if you want to use idiosyncratic tags on your bookmarks to keep your categories yours.
The only thing to keep in mind if you use them is that on public bookmarks, authors can see your tags (Authors have to go looking - they aren’t delivered to any inboxes like kudos and comments - but let’s face it, authors will look.) You can do private bookmarks, though - they won’t be visible to anyone else.
(You can also bookmark external works, if you have that favorite old lj fic you want to have on the list with everything else you love.)
I have a periodic goal that I'm going to use AO3 bookmarks to get together a list of stories to re-read when I'm trying to read good sex scenes, and so far I have added... three stories, because I keep forgetting I'm doing it, but here's an example of the kind of thing you can do: bookmarks that have used 'goodsex' as a tag.
3) Site Search / Best Match search
If you use the search box that’s on every page, the default sort is “best match”, and it searches for the term in all the headers - it doesn’t prioritize tags at all. This means that a work that has your term in the title or summary (or uses it multiple times in the headers) will come up above a work that just has it tags.
You can do the same thing on the “works search” page by putting a term in the “any field” box and setting the sort to “best match”, if you want to be able to do a more complicated search. Unfortunately, “best match” search is not an option in the filter sidebar (but see #10 below).
This is the lazy person’s version of the “summary” search operator in that it’s great at sorting out works that are actually mostly about a thing from all the works that are tagged for the thing but not about it. I mostly use it out of spite when the tag filters aren't working: "your careful tagging is UNHELPFUL so I'm going to use whatever site search spits at me SO THERE."
See what you get for Rhodey in the lazy search box. It's actually better than trying to use his tag if I actually want to read about Rhodey.
When you just want to read any new good story in a large tag but you have already read everything that sort-by-kudos brings up to the top:
4) Filter by date
You can search for only works posted (or updated) within a specific date range by using the "date updated" option in both the filter sidebar or the "date" option on the Work Search page (they work the same way.)
This tends to be very useful, for me, in large fandoms I only check back on once in awhile, where kudos type sorts tend to bring up old bad fic before they bring up new good fic, due just to accretion of kudos over time. Instead, I can filter to only bring up works posted in the past six months, and then sort on kudos, and bring the new good stuff to the top.
This is also great for avoiding spoilers or avoiding works posted after/during that canon thing/fandom trend you hate or finding all the new classics that you missed that year you were writing your dissertation and/or having a baby.
For example, The top kudosed Harry/Draco fic posted between when I got distracted by Les Mis fandom and when Cursed Child came out.
5) Filter by number of kudos/bookmarks/comments/hits
On the “Works Search” page you can also filter by a range of kudos/hits/bookmarks/comments numbers - they are way down at the bottom. You can also do this with special search operators in "search within" in the filter sidebar. So, say, you only want fics in your fandom that have more than 100 kudos, you can get those, and then you can sort them by any other sort you want, instead of having to stick to kudos sort. A kudos filter and date sort gives similar results to a date filter and kudos sort if what you're looking for is the best new fic.
You can also use them to find hidden treasures - find all works in your fandom with less than 100 hits, and then sort by kudos, for example. Or find all the works in your fandom with more than 100 kudos, and sort them by fewest hits.
For example, I can go to the Yuletide 2018 collection and find works with less than 100 hits, sorted by most kudos, to get me works that probably deserve more attention than they got.
You can even sort of hack it into a ratio search - for example, if you know solid fics in a tag usually get in the range of 750 hits, you can search for stories with “500-1000” hits and “>100” kudos, and you’ll get only stories with 1:10 or better kudos:hits ratio.
6) Favorite Tags
Did you know you can “favorite” tags? I didn’t until embarrassingly recently. If you filter on a tag, and you’re logged in, there’s a button right next to the “RSS feed” button that lets you favorite a tag. You can use this on any canonical tag! Then you can have them appear on the AO3 homepage, so when you’re bored and don’t know what you want and you just go to “AO3.org” you can be reminded of all the things you like without having to think of them yourself.
You wouldn’t think it would be that helpful but it really is.
I don't think there's a way to link people to your list automatically, but let it be said that mine is glorious and links me to all the best tags on the archive.
7) Tag Pages
I always assume everyone knows this one and then find more people who don’t.
If you filter on a tag and then click on the tag name at the top of the filter page, or you find the tag using Tag Search, you’re taken to the tag's tag page. This will show you all the tags that the tag wranglers have linked to it in any way.
A lot of it is just wrangler housekeeping, but if, for example, you go to a fandom’s tag page, it will give you a list of all the related fandoms, all the characters and relationships that have been tagged, and all of the freeform tags that have been used that are directly related to the fandom.
Note that these lists include both filterable/canonical tags and non-filterable tags, so the lists are often a lot longer than they really are. But if you click through on a non-filterable tag, it’ll either take you to the filter of the filterable tag it’s been combined with, or if it hasn’t been combined, it will take you to a tag page that lists all the works that exact tag has been used on.
You can also use “tag search” to find tags in a similar way - it will bring you a mishmash of all tags that use your search term, and clicking on them you will bring you to their tag page, whether they are filterable tags or not.
For example, I can go to the Imperial Radch tag page, scroll down to 'Additional Tags', and discover that someone has tagged a work Breq hasn't had a feeling in years, and clicking on it takes me to that tag's tag page. Since it isn't filterable, the tag page shows me all the works tagged with it (so far, only one) and I can now read about Breq and her poor abandoned feelings.
When you just need to find a VERY SPECIFIC THING okay
8) Filter on category/warning tags
As far as I know, there is no way to click on the rating, warning, and category tags on works in order to get to a filter of them, or to use the sidebar filters to filter on just one of those categories and no other tags.
But you can still get to their filter pages! And you do this either by searching for them by name in tag search, and then clicking through to the filter, or by typing the URL of the tag filter as such: https://archiveofourown.org/tags/NAME OF TAG/works (for the ones with slashes you have to escape the slash with *s*: M*s*M instead of M/M .
The main thing I have used this for is if I am looking for a very specific kink or trope with a tag that isn’t filterable, and don’t care what fandom or pairing it is, but I want the flexibility of the filter bar instead of having to use the “work search” results page or the tag page. The archive really wants you to start filtering with a canonical character, fandom, freeform, or ship, but this lets you be a person who doesn’t care.
For example, if I want camboy fics, camboy isn’t filterable, but I can go to https://archiveofourown.org/tags/M*s*M/works and then put “camboy” in the “search within results” page, and get a list of all m/m works that include the word “camboy” anywhere in their headers. And then I can use the filter sidebar to narrow it down from there. (Or if I don’t care about gender but do definitely want porn, I can start with https://archiveofourown.org/tags/Explicit/works as my base instead.)
Unfortunately, I haven’t found a way to get a base filter page that includes ALL works on the archive, but for most things I use it for, starting with category or rating works well enough. It also doesn’t work on media type tags like “TV Shows” even though it looks like it should.
9) URL Hacking
If you do a search using the tag filters, and check the URL, you will get a hot mess, like this, say:
https://archiveofourown.org/works?utf8=%E2%9C%93&commit=Sort+and+Filter&work_search%5Bsort_column%5D=revised_at&work_search%5Bother_tag_names%5D=&exclude_work_search%5Bfreeform_ids%5D%5B%5D=11175&work_search%5Bexcluded_tag_names%5D=&work_search%5Bcrossover%5D=&work_search%5Bcomplete%5D=&work_search%5Bwords_from%5D=&work_search%5Bwords_to%5D=&work_search%5Bdate_from%5D=&work_search%5Bdate_to%5D=&work_search%5Bquery%5D=&work_search%5Blanguage_id%5D=&tag_id=Enjolras*s*Grantaire+%28Les+Mis%C3%A9rables%29
It isn’t actually as much of a mess as it looks like, though! It’s totally human-readable, with a little bit of squinting, and because of that, it’s totally human editable, and because of that, you can occasionally do the human thing of making it do things it shouldn’t be able to do.
It starts with https://archiveofourown.org/works?, which is the base URL, and then it’s a series of search parameters that are just all of the options in the filter bars. The parameters are separated by &, and they consist of the parameter name, and = , and then whatever option was chosen. It includes every possible filter option, whether you’ve used them or not, but if you want to shorten the URL for sharing/bookmarking/memorizing purposes, you can remove everything with nothing after the = and the URL will still work. So the above can be shortened to:
https://archiveofourown.org/works?utf8=%E2%9C%93&commit=Sort+and+Filter&work_search%5Bsort_column%5D=revised_at&exclude_work_search%5Bfreeform_ids%5D%5B%5D=11175&tag_id=Enjolras*s*Grantaire+%28Les+Mis%C3%A9rables%29
...which is admittedly still long, but a little more manageable.
The shortened version parses into this:
https://archiveofourown.org/works? //it’s an AO3 search utf8=%E2%9C%93 //character encoding, don’t mess with this &commit=Sort+and+Filter //I think this marks it as a filter search, //and messing with it usually breaks the URL &work_search%5Bsort_column%5D=revised_at //this is the sort order, and you can mess with it! //Specifically, if you change the part after = to _score // you can get a “best match” sort on a filter page, //even though there’s no option for it in the menu. &exclude_work_search%5Bfreeform_ids%5D%5B%5D=11175 //this is currently excluding everything tagged with //modern AU, using its internal tag ID. This used to //be a useful way to get the tag ID, but there are better ways now. &tag_id=Enjolras*s*Grantaire+%28Les+Mis%C3%A9rables%29 //this is the base tag you're filtering on. This is the //only part of the URL that can’t be blank: you have to //have the correct name of one canonical tag here. It //can be any canonical tag, though, including categories/ //ratings/warnings.
There’s other things you can do by direct editing the URLs, and I’m sure some I haven’t found yet either, but it’s always worth a try if there’s something you want to see if it’ll work.
The downside is if you direct edit the URL to do something it isn't supposed to do (like Best Match search) it'll reset to the default value any time you change any of the other filters, and you'll have to re-edit the URL.
But here, for example, if you want X-Men fic that doesn't AU the wheelchair away, is Magneto/Xavier stories that aren't tagged with Alternate Timeline movies sorted by Best Match on the word "wheelchair" in their headers
(Sadly it's still not super useful because the tagging in that fandom is as much of a mess as the canon is, but that was the most complicated one I've tried in RL lately.)
10) Step outside the Archive
Because there were ways to find fic back before you had archives that had their own useful search functions! If everything fails, and you can't find that ONE STORY that you KNOW IS THERE, or if you want stories that are like this other story but not in, like, a way that's easy to explain, you can try the Old Ways. Here's a few of my favorites:
Google Site search: If you go to google and put "site:archiveofourown" in the search box with your search terms, Google theoretically acts like a full-text search of the entire website. I say theoretically, because AO3 is big enough and dynamic enough and uninterested in SEO enough that what it finds depends on how well the spiders are getting along with the unicorn squid. Also, it doesn't search locked works. So just because it doesn't find your story doesn't mean it's not there. But it will find a lot.
For example, here are over 2000 AO3 works which contain the phrase 'carded his hair' in their text.
If your search text occurs in metadata a lot, like tags or titles, the results can get messy with the same works turning up over and over again, and you can fix that by using site:archiveofourown.org/works/ instead to limit it to only work pages: here we have 259 Cerulean Orbs.
You can also just toss in keywords of multiple things that you know happened in the story even if they aren't important enough to tag: I want that one E/R fic where Grantaire brings a kitten to Enjolras's apartment and I think there's a scene where Enjolras is sleeping in the sunlight.
Find Recs By Story: This was my go-to back in the bad old Livejournal days. Find a story you really like, and google that story + the word "recs", and if you are lucky, you will find people who have recommended that story, and also recommended a lot of other stories that will work for people with similar tastes!
Variations on this involve searching for rec collections on Tumblr, DW, or Pinboard site search instead of Google.
Ask for help: There are still a few story-request or find-my-story comms around! My favorite is ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
kink_finders. Also if you post on your DW complaining about how much trouble you're having making the filters do what you want, I am constitutionally incapable of not helping, and there are other people with the same problem. I understand ff_a does storyfinding sometimes, too!
Anyway, there's mine. What are yours?
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Now if only I could find a way to find works with no relationships at all.
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