How to Save Searches and Keep a Reading Shelf on DaoSearch

The Browse pages are built for asking specific questions: completed danmei under 200k characters, cultivation with no harem, Naruto fanfiction sorted by flowers. The trouble was that the question vanished when you closed the tab, unless you bookmarked the URL. Now you can save it on the site, alongside the books it turns up.

All of this needs an account. Sign in with Google or Discord from the top of any page. Browsing never does, and nothing below changes what anyone else sees.

Build the search first

Pick a platform, open the filters, and set everything you care about: genre and subgenre, status, word count, how recently the author updated, tags to include and exclude, plus the platform's own extras like Audience or POV. Then pick the sort. A few to start from:

• Completed danmei under 200k characters, by favorites
• Completed Fanqie books by all-time reads
• Completed Faloo fanfiction, by reads
• Rebirth on Qidian, by monthly votes
• Ongoing danmei updated within 3 months, by favorites

The search guide covers every filter if you want the full list.

Save it

When the results look right, choose Save search in the filter panel. A small dialog asks for a name, and you stay on the page. Call it what you'll recognise in a month: "Finished BL, short" beats "search 3".

What gets saved is the whole filter set and the sort, on that platform. The page number isn't, so a saved search always opens at the top of its results. You can keep up to 20.

Come back to it

Your searches live on the Searches page, under Searches in the account menu. Each one shows its name and a readable summary of its filters, so you don't have to remember what "Finished BL, short" actually filtered on. Open one and you're back in the catalogue with every filter and the sort already applied.

The page has its own search box, which matches names and filters both, so typing "harem" finds every saved search that excludes it. You can also sort by date saved or name, filter to one platform, and delete what you no longer need.

The point is the results move and the search doesn't. Books get finished, new ones get tagged, read counts climb, so the same saved search gives you a different list next month. The Updated filter is relative too, so a saved "within 1 month" always means the month before the day you open it.

Five shelves for the books

The Save button on any book page, ranking row or browse result puts a novel on one of five shelves: Planned, Reading, Paused, Finished and Dropped. Move it between them from the same button whenever you like.

Your Library holds them all, across every platform, and it has filters of its own: shelf, platform, genre, whether the novel is ongoing or completed, and tags to include or exclude. Two of its sorts sound alike and aren't:

• Updated is the novel getting new chapters at its source, so a Reading shelf sorted by Updated shows which books have something new.
• Changed is you moving the book between shelves, so it shows what you touched last.

Saved, Title and Words sort the rest.

You don't have to keep checking, either. Once a day, DaoSearch sends one notification listing the books on your Planned and Reading shelves that got new chapters, finished, or climbed a ranking. How the daily digest works.

Follow booklists

Booklists work the same way. Follow one from its page and it shows up under Lists, where you can search your lists by title, filter by platform, and sort them. If a source takes a list down, it stays in your Lists marked as no longer available rather than disappearing without a word. Why booklists are worth following.

Take a copy with you

The Account page has a Download button under "Download your library". It gives you one JSON file with your saved novels, their shelves, your followed booklists and your saved searches, with the source links included. It's yours to keep, and it's the thing to grab if you ever want to move your list somewhere else. The same page is where you change your username and avatar.

When a book's details are wrong

Machine translation gets titles wrong, covers go stale, and sometimes two entries turn out to be the same book. Every book page has a Report link at the bottom, and every booklist page has one beside its figures. Pick a reason (for a book: wrong information, bad translation, duplicate book, broken source link, wrong cover or other), add a note if it helps, and a person on the team reviews it. The book's link is included automatically, so you don't need to explain which one. You need to be signed in to send a report.

You hear back in your notifications either way: "Fixed" with what was done, or "Not changed". What happens to a report.

Beside the Report link, book pages say when their details were last refreshed. If a synopsis looks out of date and the page says it was refreshed an hour ago, the source hasn't changed it yet. If it was refreshed weeks ago, a report is exactly the right move.