In an embodiment of the invention, an electronic document (e-document) can be searched and found by capturing an image of the printed document. Instead of typing in a file name or searching through multiple directories, the user simply takes a picture of the document with a camera and the system uses the document image to locate the e-document. In an alternative embodiment of the invention, an image of a printed document can be useful for remote document sharing. In various embodiments of the invention, sharing an image of a printed document can be used to email a high quality paper document, send a high quality fax, or open a document to a page containing an annotation. Through co-design of the feature extraction and search algorithm in the system, the image feature detection robustness and search speed are improved at the same time.