Reading game
Text Search — find the word, fast
A short article, one target word at a time, and 90 seconds on the clock. Scan the text, tap the word, and the next target appears — simple to learn, surprisingly hard to put down.
Free to play, no sign-up. Want to track your progress across six skills? The Axolumi app is coming to Google Play.
How to play Text Search
- A short article appears with a target word shown above it.
- Scan the text and tap the target word where it appears — if it shows up more than once, any spot counts.
- Every find brings the next target. Finish all the targets and a fresh article loads.
- Tapping the wrong word costs 2 seconds, so look before you tap.
- Stuck for 10 seconds? The sentence containing the target lights up to get you moving again.
What Text Search trains
- Reading · 50%
- Focus · 35%
- Speed · 15%
Text Search trains visual scanning in the setting where you use it most: real text. Skimming a page for one specific word is different from reading it — your eyes sweep lines, filter out everything that does not match, and lock on when the right shape appears. That skill is exactly what you use to find a name in a list, a figure in a report, or the one clause that matters in a long email, and like any search skill it gets faster with practice.
The game also leans on sustained focus and processing speed. Ninety seconds of continuous scanning does not allow the mind to wander — every lapse shows up as a slow find. And because wrong taps cost time, you cannot just tap everything that looks close; the game gently pushes you toward the sweet spot where speed and accuracy meet, which is where reading fluency actually improves.
Tips to improve
- Do not read the text — sweep it. Let your eyes glide over the lines hunting for the target's shape, not its meaning.
- Hold the word's first letter and length in mind. Most non-matches can be rejected at a glance from those two cues alone.
- Move in a pattern. A steady line-by-line sweep beats jumping around the page and re-checking places you have already covered.
- On the harder levels, watch for lookalikes — words that share a beginning or shape with the target. A half-second check costs less than a 2-second penalty.
Frequently asked questions
A word scanning game asks you to find specific words inside a larger body of text as quickly as possible. Unlike a crossword or word search grid, the words sit in ordinary sentences, so you practise the same skimming and scanning movements you use on real pages every day.
It trains one honest part of it: visual scanning. Fast readers are quick at moving their eyes across lines and picking out what matters, and that is precisely what this game exercises. Pair it with regular reading and the scanning speed you build here carries over.
A wrong tap costs 2 seconds off the clock and the word flashes red. The penalty is small but real — it rewards a brief check before tapping instead of tapping everything that looks roughly right.
If 10 seconds pass without a find, the sentence containing the target glows softly so you can narrow your search. Hinted finds are tracked separately, so relying on them shows up in your results — think of the hint as a nudge, not a strategy.
The length of the text and the rarity of the targets. Easy uses a short excerpt with common words, Medium moves to a longer excerpt where each target appears once, Hard adds rarer words and lookalike decoys, and Extreme serves a double-length article with the trickiest targets of all.
