About

BibleSearch is a search engine for the Holy Bible. It's for the verse you have in the back of your mind but can't quite remember the words to.

Searching by meaning

Most Bible search looks for the exact words you type. BibleSearch uses what's called a vector search instead. Every verse has been turned into a list of numbers that describes what it means, like a point on a map where verses about similar things sit close together.

When you search, your words are placed on the same map, and the verses nearest to them are returned. That's why a search like “don't worry about tomorrow” finds “take therefore no thought for the morrow”, even though they share almost no words.

How it was made

All 31,100 verses of the King James Version were turned into vectors with OpenAI's text-embedding-3-small model and stored in Chroma, a vector database. The site itself is written in Go, with htmx and Tailwind for the pages. The whole project is open source and can be found on GitHub.