Bible software products require search engines with distinctive requirements. We use complex algorithms from information retrieval to build search engines that are powerful and flexible yet lightning fast and make light use of computing resources.
Miklal has built the general search engine for a major Bible software company, as well as smaller-scale search engines such as in the Greek New Testament for Android App and the E-Ink KJV Bible for Kindle, as described below.
If you are responsible for a Bible software product and would like to add or improve search capabilities, please contact us.
Speedy and Sleek, Boolean and Fuzzy
This presentation demonstrates how our search engines combine power and efficiency. Note that this particular presentation focuses on our Boolean text search engines, but we have built fuzzy (Google-style) search engines as well. Please contact us if you are interested to know more about our work with fuzzy search engines.
User-friendly Complex Searches
Our Boolean text search engines allow for a variety of types of searches.
The complex search tools integrated into our Greek New Testament for Android app and E-Ink KJV Bible exemplify some of the search capabilities that we offer.
Within these two resources, you can easily conduct one-word searches, or you can use our elegant, yet powerful, search syntax to gain more control over the search, searching for virtually any combination of words—and the same whether you are searching in English or in Greek. In the GNT for Android app, with the addition of the Greek morphology, you can search by lemma (dictionary form) instead of the surface form of the text as well.
Examples of what the user can search for, using English words for ease of comprehension (search strings in bold), include:
- abra*m finds all the occurrences of “Abram” and “Abraham”
- god promise finds all the occurrences of the words “God” and “promise” in the same verse
- jesus “holy ghost” within 2 verses finds all the occurrences of “Jesus” and “holy ghost” within 2 verses of each other
The search results are presented in an intuitive and easy-to-use format, with the number of total hits up top, and each hit displayed with its reference in canonical order. Select a given hit to open the Bible to that verse.
Optimizing Search Results Display
When displaying the results of a text search, whether Boolean or fuzzy, it is important that the user be able to see the search term(s) in context. When space for displaying the results is limited, this means selecting the most relevant context possible within the given constraints. We have developed techniques for algorithmically finding the best context for a key word in whatever space is available.
(This presentation focuses on its application for concordances, but similar techniques can be used for displaying search results more broadly.)
If you are interested in integrating search engine capabilities like these into your app or software, please contact us.