Exploring Documents

If you're not quite certain what you're looking for, place your mouse over the Explore button at the top of the site. You'll see a menu of our most popular categories of documents and members. Click one, or click "all categories" to see even more choices.

FAQs About Exploring Documents

• How do I browse content by category?
• What are "rising" documents?
• Can I browse only certain types of documents, or documents in a specific language?

Searching for Documents

If you have an idea what you're looking for, you can search Scribd for it. Simply type some words into the search box at the top of the site.

When searching for a popular document, collection, or publisher, our auto-complete feature will display results that best match your search keywords.

The publicly available documents on Scribd that contain your search terms will appear in your search results, with those most likely to be relevant near the top.

Click on a search result to view that document. Sometimes your search will return more than one page of results, and you can navigate through the search results by clicking the << and >> links or the page numbers at the bottom of the list. You can filter your results using the Search Options at the top of the list, and you can combine any of the filters together to further fine-tune what documents appear in the results.

When you search Scribd for documents, we display results that are written in your preferred language. Sometimes this can lead to unexpected results:

• Your web browser automatically includes your preferred language in the request it makes when you perform a search. If your browser sends the wrong language preference you could see the wrong search results. (For example, there are probably no documents written in Polish that match "حياة الرافعي".)
• Scribd documents have a "Language" property. Upon upload, our system tries to autodetect the language a document is written in, and the uploader can always change it later by editing its properties. Sometimes our system gets it wrong, and occasionally even a document's uploader will set the wrong language.

When you see the "no results" page, try setting the "Language" filter to "All Languages" or clicking the "try searching for the same thing in all languages" link.

Searching for People/Collections

If you want to search for relevant Scribd members, click on the People tab above the search results. You can also search through users' Collections.

FAQs About Searching for Documents

• How do tags and categories differ?