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What follows is the talk propoal I submitted for BibleTech:2011

With more and more content being created every day, and old content continually being digitized, it is becoming increasingly more difficult to locate the best content on a topic or scripture verse/passage. The answer to this problem is: search. More than ever before, when people have a question, they "Google" it. In the same way, when people want to find information in the Bible, they search for it, but most of the search functions on today's Bible sites are tied to a specific translation. So, if a user has memorized a different translation, their query fails. And, when searching content that is biblical in nature, most search engines do not understand the verse reference, and, as such, they parse it like it is just another collection of words and symbols. This also causes poor results to be returned to the user.

This talk will cover techniques for searching the Bible, Biblical content, and the Web by describing and demonstrating a search engine that: understands the verse reference, uses synonyms and multiple translations from which to build its index, and uses the wealth of extra-biblical resources to enhance the process of locating the best matches to a users query.