Lesson 1 | Searching a Topic
Searching Wide
Topics for searching may emerge from a passage you are studying, from a conversation with a friend, from a sermon you listen to, from something you read in the news, or from somewhere else.
“What does the Bible say about _?”
Your first instinct when seeking to answer such a question should be to go wide in your search. You are not interested in just one thing the Bible says about a subject, but all that the Bible says about it.
Strategies for Searching Wide
1. Search multiple versions at once
By default, Biblearc will search your top five translations all at once. This makes finding verses much faster and is a great way to widen your search.
To change the particular versions included in a search, you can either add the in:[versions] flag to the end of your search text (e.g. unintentional in:ESV,NASB) or use the checkboxes that appear when clicking the version abbreviations from the search results heading.
2. Think about different forms of the word you are searching
For English, this oftentimes means different endings. Search for varied endings by placing an asterisk at the end of the word. In our example, this increases the number of results from 4 to 24 since it finds both “intentional” and “intentionally.”
3. Think about synonyms and other ways of expressing the idea
A topic is a concept, not a particular word. So when you want to find verses with any of a number of words, include slashes between them. Also, you can search exact phrases (like without intent) by placing them in quotation marks.
