MyBible for Android – Bible text search possibilities

Search Possibilities in General

A quick and simple (and also typical) search for a particular Bible text in MyBible is to type distinctive parts of words you are looking for, – all of them to be simply present in a single verse. This helps you instantly find a verse which someone has just cited to you. Remember: distinctive parts of words are the key to quick and focused results.

You can type whole words, but MyBible will not automatically look for variations of those words, unless you use the asterisk and type something like pleas* – then MyBible will find pleased, pleasing, please.

If the order of typed words is important to find the exact place you are looking for, tell MyBible to mind the order of words while allowing some other words between them. There is a search setting for that, but you can also command that to MyBible for this particular search by specifying +r somewhere in your entered text (usually at the end).

It is not infrequent when words of a citation you look for are not in a single verse but are spread between several nearby verses. To find that, you still enter distinctive parts of words you are looking for and add at the end +1 or, say, +10. This tells MyBible that verses that constitute your sought fragment can be up to 1 (or 10, respectively) verses apart from each other. Specifying +0 will make MyBible look for your words in a single verse for this particular search.

If you know an exact phrase you are looking for, that is, a sequence of words with no other words between them, type those words and enclose them into double quotes, e.g. “who told you that”, “the fath* of nimr*”. If you are looking for a double quote character itself, enter it twice, e.g. “said “”I am the god”

You can also tell MyBible what words shall not be present in the search results, – using ~ before such words. For example, god almighty ~lord +0 will give you verses mentioning God Almighty but not LORD in a single verse.

You can tell MyBible what Bible books to search in – by selecting one of popular groups of books or by fine-tuning a custom subset of books to search in.

You can search for highlighted/underlined words in a Bible module, any type of highlighting or a particular highlight/underline color and/or underline type. Actually, if you set a corresponding search setting and leave the text to search empty, MyBible will find and show all your highlighted places in that Bible module.

In search results, found places are highlighted with color. Words highlighted or underlined by you in the Bible text are shown underlined.

In search results you can see words of Jesus in bold and words added by translators in italic – there is a corresponding search setting for that (it is on by default; you can suppress that for a concrete search by adding -m in the text to search for).

There are also settings to show Strong’s numbers in search results.

The search settings window contains all the settings for filtering and for representing of search results. Please note a hint on the right of every setting, telling you what special characters (like +w, +r, +2, etc.) to enter in the text to search for in order to force particular settings for a concrete search.

Wildcards

• * (asterisk) means that any number (including none) of the same word’s letters can be in its place.
  This feature, in combination with the “Search for whole words” setting, allows finding variations of the same word. E.g. fare* will find the words fare, fared, farewell, but not welfare and not warfare.
  It also allows finding words ending the same. E.g. *gite will find Agagite and Areopagite.
• _ (underscore) means that any single letter of the same word can be in its place.
  E.g.: grave_ will find both graven and graves.

Search settings

Search settings allow you to narrow down (filter) search results. When all the filtering settings are unchecked (and this is the default state), you will get the widest possible set of search results.

Search for whole words (+w)

This setting tells MyBible to treat the entered text as complete word(s) to find, without any added beginning or ending. For example, with this setting being on, a search for spouse will ignore the words espouse, spouses.

This setting also helps to find word forms using *. For instance, while searching for whole words, repair* with find repair, repaired, repairs, but not prepare.

Search words in the specified order (+r)

This setting tells MyBible to mind the order of words you have entered while allowing some other words between them.

Search accounting for accents and similar characters (+a)

This setting takes into account accents you have entered – this is useful when presence of those makes a difference for you in search results.

Case sensitive search (+c)

With this setting on, MyBible will, for example, ignore the words Lord and LORD if you have entered the word lord to be found.

Search distinguishing quote and dash types (+q)

This setting will allow you to search for special kinds of asymmetric quotes and long dashes. When this setting is not set, MyBible treats any entered kind of double quotes as straight double quotes, and thus assumes you’ve meant to enter an exact phrase (see above).

Search only in words of Jesus (+j)

This setting can be useful if you want to search for some word(s) among the words which the Bible conveys as direct words said by Jesus.

Another possible application of this setting is to find where and how many verses contain direct words of Jesus in particular books of the Bible. For that, you could limit selection of books you search in (obviously, it makes sense to select only New Testament books in this case), and enter nothing as the text to search for. This will essentially tell MyBible to find (and thus also to count) all the verses where Jesus’ words are present in the book(s) you have selected.

This setting only works in Bible modules having a corresponding markup in them.

Search only in inserted words (added by translators) (+i)

This setting allows you to discover how many words in a Bible translation into your language the translators of the Bible had to add to make the sentences coherent and reading smoothly. This will also remind you that there is no and cannot possibly be a “perfect” translation of the Bible from the languages of its original manuscripts.

Also, let’s assume for a moment that you want to deliver a message on analysis of some word usage in different places of the Scriptures. You might want to check first, using this MyBible search feature, where this word, possibly brightly standing out in some verse, is actually an inserted word, – that is, being absent in the Hebrew or ancient Greek manuscripts of the Scriptures. This could help you be more careful with preaching in that context.

This setting only works in Bible modules having a corresponding markup in them.

Search only in highlighted or underlined text (+h)

This setting allows you to limit a search only to words that you have highlighted or underlined in the Bible module being searched.

This setting can also help you find all the places you have highlighted in the Bible module: activate it and run a search when no text is entered in the search string. All the words that you have highlighted or underlined in a Bible module will be shown underlined in the search results.

There is a possibility of searching for a particular color of highlighting or for a particular type/color of underlining.

Max number of verses between sought words (+1)

This is a powerful setting that will let you overcome splitting of the Bible text into verses and chapters (you should be aware that such a splitting is not a property of the original Bible manuscripts in Hebrew and ancient Greek).

The number in this setting tells MyBible the allowed verse numbering difference between verses that contain your sought words. 1 means one verse apart, that is, two verses that contain your sought words can be adjacent. 2 means that one verse that does not contain your sought words can be in between the two verses that do, and so on. 0 means that you want all your entered words to be in the same verse.

Representing of results

These settings allow you to see more or less information in verses found by your search.

Highlight words of Jesus… (+m)

This setting lets you turn off showing of words of Jesus in bold and showing of inserted words in italic, as that could be distracting in some cases.

Show Strong’s numbers (+s)

This rather powerful setting lets you see the words of the original Bible manuscripts that were translated into your language. This setting has several fine-tuning sub-settings shown if you tap the “Configure” button. Note that an ability to show a pronunciation, a shown definition and so on depends on the features of the Strong’s lexicon module that you have selected when accessing Strong’s numbers from the Bible window.

This setting can make you see interesting things, e.g. if you search for the word love in words of Jesus, you will see that different Greek words are used for that in different contexts.

Single occurrence of every verse found by a search (+v)

Here is when this setting can be helpful. Imagine you remember a phrase you want to find, but do not remember in which Bible translation it was stated like that, and you just want to find that place and then study it attentively using your favorite Bible translation. Imagine you have 5 Bible modules downloaded, 3 of them have this place as you remember, 2 others have it translated slightly differently. So you run a search in several Bible modules (see below), and if this setting is not set, you will get your verse repeated 3 times in the search results (from 3 different Bible modules), while you just wanted to find where it was, not how it was spelled in those 3 modules. So you set this setting and get the sought place reported just once (in the first Bible module where it was found, and you have a way in MyBible to arrange the modules to search in a particular order, using module sets).

Searching in several Bible modules

The big search button works for the current Bible module. There is also a smaller search button, which allows you to search in several Bible modules.

Searching in several Bible modules is based on module sets. Long-touch the smaller search button to work with module sets and to select a module set to be searched. There are three predefined module sets (with the default one being “All Bible modules in a language of the current Bible module”). You can define additional module sets; note that you can manually assign/change the order of Bible modules placed into a module set.

Combining of search fragments

This is a bit advanced search feature, but keep reading if you want to master an additional power when searching in MyBible – there is nothing too complicated, it is just a bit like building a logical or mathematical expression, and it could serve you well some day.

When you just enter words in the text to search for, MyBible assumes that you want to find all those words – that is, to combine them by “and”. But you have two special characters, & (meaning “and”) and | (meaning “or”) to tell MyBible explicitly how to combine the entered fragments. Once you enter those characters in your text to search, MyBible will no longer operate space-separated words but will consider the texts entered in between those characters as fragments to combine. In addition to those special characters you can use parentheses to group search conditions (combining “by &” has a higher priority than combining “by |”).

Here is an example of how this might look like:
(servant | prison) & debt & ~borrow
which means: finding a verse mentioning “servant” or “prison”, which would also refer to a “debt” but wouldn’t mention “borrow”