Video description: an AO3 tutorial, narrated by a female voice and posted on tiktok.
The screen shows an AO3 news post titled Hidden search operators cheatsheet.
"Do you ever forget the title and author of a fic, but you remember the summary?"
The video scrolls down the page and highlights one bullet point on the cheatsheet.
summary: string for works with a particular word or phrase (in quotation marks) in the summary
"You can actually search for that."
The screen changes to show a closeup of the Search box embedded in the coloured bar at the top of the AO3 homepage. Inside the box are the words summary: love
"So you can search here using a keyword. Pro-tip, the word "love" is going to get you a million results."
The search changes to summary: conferences
"But the other day, I posted a fic with the word conferences in the summary, and I think that's probably pretty rare, so let's see."
The user presses the search button and the results page populates. The user zooms in to show 322 Found.
"Okay, 322 found. Out of 7 million, that's not bad!"
The screen returns to the search box. This time the text inside the box reads summary: "conferences kind of suck"
"But I used the phrase conferences kind of suck, so if I search for that and put that phrase in quotation marks-"
The user presses the search button again and the results page populates. This time there is one 1 story found.
"Look! It's the only result."
The screen changes to show the page containing all 32177 Works in the Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. fandom.
"And the thing is, if I know the fandom that it's in, or the ship, or anything else, I can filter-"
The user taps on the Filter button to open up the sidebar. The screen changes to a zoomed in view of the lower portion of the sidebar with the Search Within Results box at the centre of the screen. An emoji of a hand points to it. Inside the box is the text summary: conferences
"And I can use that same search operator in the Search Within Results box" Note: This is instead of doing it in the search box at the top of the page.
The user presses the Sort & Filter button and the results page populates showing 2 works found within the fandom.
"And look! There's only two works found, and they're both in the fandom, and one of them is my fic."