Brand new search engine ready to be tested
Comments
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Mark Barnes (Faithlife) said:
I'd assume the display would be similar to All Search, with icons for Cloud Books and Print Library books.
That makes sense.
Thanks Mark
Too soon old. Too late smart.
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Dave Hooton said:
predictions of christ's return - first few results were ok and then the focus on his "return" was dropped.
when will Jesus return - was much better with more books from my library!
pretribulation rapture - was very good except i had to buy one of the books!
I'm impressed so far.
I'm very much into eschatology and Revelation and it has helped speed up my research into various topics. Rephrasing helps with relevancy.
Query: God divorces Israel
#5 = 2. The Practice of Divorce in Israel Dictionary of the Old Testament: Prophets (p. 535)
---> "God" is missing from the highlighted text in that heading, but it omits two less relevant headings where "divorce" and "Israel" are also present.#8 = The Plot of the Twelve: Warnings of Impending Divorce from Israel Introduction to the Prophets (p. 209)
---> All three words are present in the highlighted text and I would have rated it higher than the previous result.
Both books are (obviously) in my Library. The first four deserve their place and show that:
- [match all forms] works with "divorces"
- "Yahweh" is recognised as God
But is YHWH recognised as God as DOTP (#5 above) may have gained additional results (and deserved its ranking)?
.
EDIT: Altering the query to YHWH divorces Israel shows the same result for DOTP, which is now the #2 result whilst Introduction to the Prophets drops to #13 whilst bringing in another owned book at #11 because of YHWH. Most of the intervening results were not relevant, so whilst YHWH is recognised it appears to not be strictly equivalent to God?
Dave
===Windows 11 & Android 13
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Mark,
I find the new search tool useful. What I was attempting to do though was find more Wesleyan/Church of the Nazarene sources; but I am guessing there probably isn't much that FaithLife has purchased from the now defunct Nazarene Publishing House. I am trying to find some old books that I have in boxes that I might be able to incorporate into Logos so that it might be possible to get rid of my rather large book library that is sitting in boxes in storage because I have so little room. I found a few Adam Clarke and Greathouse books. I found the tool easy to use.
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Nazarene Publishing House isn't defunct, its name was changed to https://www.thefoundrypublishing.com/ and yes, I wish more of their books were in Logos, especially the new volume by Dr Noble.
On topic: I am enjoying the new search feature but the increased reading load is starting to add up.0 -
Congrats, Mark. This is a huge improvement.
I feel like this type of technology will finally allow us to stop going to Google when we want to find something we know we have in our library [:)].
It feels to me like the type of search that should be the default search for the software, once it's optimized. With the other searches being for more precise use cases (and still in desperate need of a UI - along the lines of the Bible Browser UI, for example - to allow the user to browse and insert advanced search syntax).
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Brian Evans said:
Nazarene Publishing House isn't defunct, its name was changed to https://www.thefoundrypublishing.com/ and yes, I wish more of their books were in Logos, especially the new volume by Dr Noble.
On topic: I am enjoying the new search feature but the increased reading load is starting to add up.I think I saw that, but my old account doesn't work. At the end of the day, I like the new search engine.
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One search which has failed for me is "list of psams by theme" or "give me a list of psalms by theme" or "list of psalms by topic."
None of them seemed to be able to figure out where such a list in the library might exist. Whereas Google immediately gives relevant results.
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Fr Devin Roza said:
One search which has failed for me is "list of psams by theme" or "give me a list of psalms by theme" or "list of psalms by topic."
None of them seemed to be able to figure out where such a list in the library might exist. Whereas Google immediately gives relevant results.
That's a really interesting case. I got slightly better results by adding a verb in there (either "arranged" or "organized"; e.g., "psalms arranged by theme" or "psalms organized by topic"). This is something AI ought to be able to figure out.
One of the hits I found when using "psalms arranged by theme" (without quotation marks) in a Books search in Logos (not this beta web version) was a courseware textbook that reminded me of the existence of the Psalms Explorer that does exactly this kind of organizing of the psalms by theme. Which leads me to the realization that this new search engine ought to not only help people find answers in their Library but direct them to Logos Tools that could do for them what they are trying to do.
In fact, this kind of AI search needs to be added to Help as well, so people can type in what they are trying to do, in their own words, and it would find them the information on how to do that in Logos in terminology they might not have thought to ask about. I'd love to see AI make 75% of the questions asked on the forums be answerable in the software.
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This a welcome addition to Logos. I hope it is implemented soon!
For me, the ability to sort by the books I own is a must. Otherwise, I doubt if I would use it as much. I don't mind having books I don't own in the results, but would want the option to sort. I would have my owned books listed first, then the unowned books after.
Can you explain how this is different than an "All Search" currently in Logos? I know that all search is more precise, as stated earlier. I know that you can use more natural language in the experimental search. But I don't understand what is happening in the background, other than you are using AI. In simple terms, how does this work under the hood?Macbook Air (2024), Apple M2, 16gb Ram, Mac Sequoia, 1TB storage
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Mark, please note this followup suggestion which should decrease the maintenance load and increase Bible search capabilities without requiring advanced syntax. SUGGESTION: Bible search followup to the Experimental web search -- enhanced Bible Browser - Logos Forums
Orthodox Bishop Alfeyev: "To be a theologian means to have experience of a personal encounter with God through prayer and worship."; Orthodox proverb: "We know where the Church is, we do not know where it is not."
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Oh my gosh, I love this. This would have to be the feature of the year for me. Thank you so much for all you guys do to innovate this software.
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Mal Walker said:
I suspect my discomfort arises from some expectation that when I ask a question using natural language, I expect an answer using natural language - not a catalogue list of resources I don't own. I
We've experimented quite a bit with different AI approaches. We could of course, just pipe the query through to ChatGPT, but it simply hallucinates too often for serious trusted study, at least at the moment. Take this example, from one of the questions you asked of experimental search:
We've also tried "feeding" a large-language model with "answers" from our resources in order to get a natural language "answer" back. Using one of our private prototypes, I tried that, and it gave me a confident but wrong answer of 19 times to the same question.We're running lots of experiments and trying to follow the constantly-changing technology, but at the moment, we're not convinced that ChatGPT and its siblings are sufficiently accurate to incorporate into Logos.
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Mark Barnes (Faithlife) said:
but it simply hallucinates too often for serious trusted study, at least at the moment...we're not convinced that ChatGPT and its siblings are sufficiently accurate to incorporate into Logos.
Amen to that, and your example illustrates the problem well. It's mildly depressing that ChatGPT even quotes John 1:1 and can't recognize the multiple uses of 'word' within the verse, let alone the whole book. I certainly wouldn't want users confidence in the reliability of their bible study/software to be impacted by the implementation of AI if the technology isn't there.
Thanks for taking the time to respond, it's helpful to hear that you guys have been experimenting with different approaches.
Current MDiv student at Trinity Theological College - Perth, Western Australia
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Right now, I am just using this for basic searches; I never really got into the crazy syntax searching and everything (but I'm sure that will come soon for me). I am really enjoying what it's bringing up, even in the realm of things I do not own. Thank you for this!
Pastor, Mt. Leonard Baptist Church, SBC
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Rosie Perera said:
In fact, this kind of AI search needs to be added to Help as well, so people can type in what they are trying to do, in their own words, and it would find them the information on how to do that in Logos in terminology they might not have thought to ask about. I'd love to see AI make 75% of the questions asked on the forums be answerable in the software.
I would find that option extremely useful! Most Help texts are just awful and never answer the question (for any product anywhere, it seems).
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I am very impressed at first glance.
I tried these with quite decent results:- story about a man and ravens
- parable about a farmer
- river NEAR tree in Heaven
- discourse analysis of James 3:13–18
- footwashing in Greek and Roman culture
- prayers of prophets
- Jesus and dicipels (it fixes minor misspellings)
Failed: alliterated outline of Mt 25:1-13
You are on to something great...I hope it shows up on the desktop soon AND my phone.
I keep wishing I could see an author's name.0 -
I find the results to be better ranked accordig to relevance than a normal search. GPT can summarise but are almost 80% of the time wrong with some small detail mostly because they don’t have resources tagged like Logos. I love the fact that results are based on literary text and not assumptions about the text.
I searched for “How many giants were killed in David’s lifetime?” and didn’t get a final answer straight away. This is good as it force me to read and think for myself. Other AI’s tend to be to certain about what they present as facts and could fool one into getting lazy. Funny and I could be wrong, but the headings of top ranked results were so good I didn’t need the context to decide if I will read the resource or not.
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Very helpful. It would be good if there could be the option of changing other English
languages from
Blessings in Christ.
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ds. P.J. Kotze said:
I searched for “How many giants were killed in David’s lifetime?” and didn’t get a final answer straight away.
This really is a natural language search feature not a chatbot feature so you shouldn't expect it to be able to answer questions such as this. Put another way, this manipulates the search argument to consider all sorts of wordings for what you want to find. It doesn't manipulate the text being searched as a chatbot does.
Orthodox Bishop Alfeyev: "To be a theologian means to have experience of a personal encounter with God through prayer and worship."; Orthodox proverb: "We know where the Church is, we do not know where it is not."
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Tes said:
Very helpful. It would be good if there could be the option of changing other English
languages from
There is an option, but only when you first open the panel. It's at the bottom of the panel.
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It's now possible to restrict your search to only books you have a license to:
One caveat – as this is an experiment, we haven't indexed every single Logos book. So there may be some books that you own that are not yet being searched.
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Mark Barnes (Faithlife) said:
It's now possible to restrict your search to only books you have a license to:
One caveat – as this is an experiment, we haven't indexed every single Logos book. So there may be some books that you own that are not yet being searched.
This is great! Thanks for this change.
EDIT: I'm noticing that it doesn't remember my setting. I have to change it each time. Can that be fixed?
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Thanks Mark, that's very helpful! Quick clarification, does this restriction mean books that are in my library (both digital and print) or only books that I am licensed to?
Current MDiv student at Trinity Theological College - Perth, Western Australia
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Like it so far. Very easy to use, great results. Much more like the searches we are used to using searching the internet.
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This is an excellent search engine. Is there an ETA? Are we talking months or the next major release? (Apologies if this has been addressed elsewhere)
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Jerry Bush said:
But I don't understand what is happening in the background, other than you are using AI. In simple terms, how does this work under the hood?
There are three steps to it at the moment:
- First, we run a standard search. It's similar to the existing search, but much looser. It ignores common words like "and" or "but", and will return results even if they don't include all the words you're search for. We then rank all those articles according to how frequently they match terms in your query.
- Next, we look at the semantic content of all the top search results, which is the first bit of AI magic. That means we start looking at the meaning of the words, not just the words themselves. The AI will know, for example, that "glossolalia" has a very similar meaning to "speaking in tongues". So if you've searched for the latter, but there's a search result that uses the word "glossolalia" a lot, that result will get bumped up the rankings as a result.
- The third step is another bit of AI magic, where we use AI to try and determine which of the top results best answers the question which was posed. Up to 10 results are bumped to the top of the results if the AI determines that they do, in fact, answer the question. If the AI isn't reasonably confident the articles directly answer a question posed, this step may not change the results. But if it is confident, this step will affect the ranking and may also change the search snippet to the one or two sentences that the AI thinks best answer the question.
So, in a simplified format:
- Rank the results according to the words searched for
- Re-rank the top results according to the meaning of the words searched for
- Move to the top those results where the question in the query is answered by the article as a whole.
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Kiyah said:
I'm noticing that it doesn't remember my setting. I have to change it each time. Can that be fixed?
It should stay for the lifetime of the panel.
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Mal Walker said:
does this restriction mean books that are in my library (both digital and print) or only books that I am licensed to?
And the moment, Print Library books are NOT included in Your Books, although this may change in the future.
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Thanks for that Mark. I'd support the use of this search engine for print books - as a student with access to a large theological library plus my own print resources I already own but am not in a position to purchase again digitally, the ability to subject them to the same search would be very helpful. I realise the default search will include all of logo's digital resources, but that often widens the net too large for practical use.
Also, thanks for breaking down how it works, that's been very helpful. A question about step three:
How does the AI detect if a question has been asked? Is it based on the use of key terms such as 'who, what, when, where, why' etc? And if so, am I correct in understanding that how I frame the question will modify the search snippet and thus yield different results?Mark Barnes (Faithlife) said:The third step is another bit of AI magic, which is run if we detect that the query typed in was a question.
Current MDiv student at Trinity Theological College - Perth, Western Australia
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Will this take prioritization into account? I searched - outline of 1 Samuel. It returned a few good results, but I would prefer the outlines from my top resources.
Excellent search though. Really useful!
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Mal Walker said:
ow does the AI detect if a question has been asked? Is it based on the use of key terms such as 'who, what, when, where, why' etc? And if so, am I correct in understanding that how I frame the question will modify the search snippet and thus yield different results?
Unfortunately, AI is a little bit of a black box. No-one really understands exactly how it works. And it's not so much that the AI tries to detect a question in an abstract sense, but rather whether any of the articles answer the query directly. So it's the combination of query and search results that determines that part of the process. I've updated my earlier post to make that a bit clearer.
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Mike Tourangeau said:
This is an excellent search engine. Is there an ETA? Are we talking months or the next major release? (Apologies if this has been addressed elsewhere)
There's no ETA, I'm afraid. We want to get it out to people as soon as we can, but there are still quite a lot of problems we need to solve before we can release it properly.
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Mark Barnes (Faithlife) said:
There's no ETA, I'm afraid. We want to get it out to people as soon as we can, but there are still quite a lot of problems we need to solve before we can release it properly.
Even in this early stage it is incredibly useful. I'd love to have even a wonky version in desktop sooner than later.
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[Y] Yes! even the hobbled version is very useful - sooner is better. Maybe call it version 0.1(with appropriate disclaimers that it is a work in progress).
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Mark Barnes (Faithlife) said:Kiyah said:
I'm noticing that it doesn't remember my setting. I have to change it each time. Can that be fixed?
It should stay for the lifetime of the panel.
When I close the web app and then reopen it, even if the panel is still open on the layout when I closed and reopened it, it doesn't remember my setting. So if I close the web app without closing/changing the layout, and then reopen the web app to the same layout, it's not remembering my setting. Is that a bug?
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This search gave me pretty good results:
[quote]
What does ἐμβατεύων mean in Colossians 2:18?
But when I tried:
[quote]
What does ἐμβατεύων or embateuōn mean in Colossians 2:18?
It doesn't seem to work as well. It seems like my results weren't accounting for the transliteration and that those were alternative terms for the same search. The first search got the best results but I wanted to make sure I got any results that happened to transliterate the Greek.
Could it be programmed to automatically look for both non-transliterated and transliterated results when you put in an original language term? Could it even be smart enough to search for both the inflected form I entered and its lemma?
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Mark Barnes (Faithlife) said:
it's not so much that the AI tries to detect a question in an abstract sense, but rather whether any of the articles answer the query directly. So it's the combination of query and search results that determines that part of the process.
I don't mind rephrasing my query if the results are not as relevant as desired because I still get useful information (mainly from locked resources)
e.g. sinai AND the bride gave me info about the "Father" as #1:
The Father of the BrideThe Father of the Bride Malachi begins by pointing to the Lord’s role as Israel’s Father. The rhetorical questions “Have we not all one Father? Has not one God created us?” (Mal. 2:10) are clearly intended to evoke the answer, “Yes.”
Zephaniah, Haggai, Malachi (Reformed Expository Commentary | REC)
The next 4 were directly relevant and showed that Sinai seemed to be equated to wilderness.
Whereas the bride at sinai provided some of the above results, but was overall less relevant.
The Jewish interpretations came from books I don't own. Results quickly degenerated to a focus on "bride" using my own books.
Dave
===Windows 11 & Android 13
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I was persuaded to participate in this beta by Rosie; thank you. My question was I thought straight forward:
which kings of Judah were related to Jesus
The answers I received were not helpful. There were names bolded that were not in Christ's genealogy. I would think bolded text should be answering the question asked. I may have a mistaken impression of how the tool functions.
I read all the posts and I believe this observation is original. I may be mistaken. I'm going to give it another go, simplifying the question to
kings in Jesus' genealogy
Edit: the answer I got to the above question was more satisfying although, not what I was expecting. I'll try a different question and see if I can determine which questions work best.
Meanwhile, Jesus kept on growing wiser and more mature, and in favor with God and his fellow man.
International Standard Version. (2011). (Lk 2:52). Yorba Linda, CA: ISV Foundation.
MacBook Pro MacOS Sequoia 15.3 1TB SSD
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The following question returned better results:
how is righteousness related to obedience
Mark, is one of the objectives to identify the types of questions users would pose and "tune up" the engine to these type questions? I think I read this in one of your posts.
Meanwhile, Jesus kept on growing wiser and more mature, and in favor with God and his fellow man.
International Standard Version. (2011). (Lk 2:52). Yorba Linda, CA: ISV Foundation.
MacBook Pro MacOS Sequoia 15.3 1TB SSD
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I observed quite by chance that if you propose the same question with the exact same terms you generate different results. Is this by design or something that requires tweaking?
The second results were better! The question I posed twice in order to do the thumbs was:
kings in Jesus' genealogy
Meanwhile, Jesus kept on growing wiser and more mature, and in favor with God and his fellow man.
International Standard Version. (2011). (Lk 2:52). Yorba Linda, CA: ISV Foundation.
MacBook Pro MacOS Sequoia 15.3 1TB SSD
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It is my understanding/experience that this search is NOT designed to answer questions in the sense your queries imply. That is expecting the search to understand the meaning of the question. This tool seems better understood as allowing you to search without using any logical operators e.g. "common stories of Adam in Genesis and Apocalypse of Abraham" without having to mark phrases or add NEAR . . . but the magic is in the results having recognized words with similar meanings and its rankings of the results
Note that the regular search produces cards filled with irrelevant results
Orthodox Bishop Alfeyev: "To be a theologian means to have experience of a personal encounter with God through prayer and worship."; Orthodox proverb: "We know where the Church is, we do not know where it is not."
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This is fantastic. The more I experiment with it, the more I love it for certain types of searches...
For example, searching for 'determining the gender of a greek noun' or 'the importance of archaeology in biblical studies' gives me much richer results based on the thematic concept, whereas the search engine in Logos is a bit one dimensional or all over the map based on the number of hits on similar words.
The results were not only richer, but it highlighted some buried monographs that might have taken me some extensive searching to uncover. I also find the results including resources that I don't own very useful, as it highlights additional resources I should perhaps consider adding at some point.
This definitely as a real value add even in the experimental form. This would have been a huge timesaver for me in my studies some years back.
Now that we are hooked... [H] [:)] [Y]
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Question "who is the strongest man in the Bible" It cannot find the answer
Question "how old was adam when he died"? Lexham Bible dictionary nailed it, which was the first answer.
Mission: To serve God as He desires.
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My two test queries were "ontological justification in the early church" and "what was the Origenist Controversy." The first one did not return any results that other search engines might return, partly because the search engine (naturally!) did not understand the difference between ontological justification in contrast to judicial justification, and so returned results that dealt with discussions about ontology. So this search was not all that impressive for me.
The second query did return a lot of correct hits because the phrase "Origenist Controversy" is used regularly in texts. It did bring in some "related" terms that a regular search engine would have probably missed.
So while any improvement in searching texts for content are welcome, we still need to think for ourselves and imagine what related search terms would be relevant for our study. If and when the day comes when we rely on search engines to do our critical thinking and to replace our human ingenuity, we have truly lost something extremely valuable and God-given.
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Mark Barnes (Logos) said:
We've been working on a brand-new search engine that doesn't require special syntax to answer your queries. It's very experimental at this stage, but we'd love your feedback.
We're not yet ready to include the search engine in the desktop app, but you can access it on web here: https://beta.app.logos.com/search?kind=semantic
We'd love you to run real questions/queries there and use the thumbs-up/thumbs-down icons in the results to let us know how well the engine has answered your query.
Then come back to this thread and let us know your overall impressions.
To be clear, we don't intend to replace our existing search engine with all its advanced syntax. That won't be going away. And it's designed for searching your books, not the Bible. But we hope it will have a place in making search even simpler.
Do you have a sample search query you want us to try? So far, everything I've run by it is identical to what I get in the desktop app. I must be doing something wrong. :-)
Dr. Nathan Parker
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Nathan Parker said:
Do you have a sample search query you want us to try? So far, everything I've run by it is identical to what I get in the desktop app. I must be doing something wrong. :-)
No, we want to learn how people use a search engine like this.
Make sure you're on the beta web app (https://beta.app.logos.com) and are on the Experimental search type.
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Is there a way for us to see our search history for the Experimental search tab? It would be nice to go back to an old search when you can't remember exactly what you typed in.
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I was reading The Book of Enoch | The Eastern Anglo-Saxonist (wordpress.com) which discusses the demonic origins of metalwork. Which got me wondering how the new search handled issues rooted in Christian studies but outside the more narrow confines of Logos' definition of Bible studies. So I tried "demonic origin metalwork" in the new search. I was pleasantly surprised at how close to the subject it stuck while finding nothing that actually met the request. I would have been even happier if the search returned a resource available in Logos that discussed this odd bit of trivia ... but such breadth is not yet available.
Orthodox Bishop Alfeyev: "To be a theologian means to have experience of a personal encounter with God through prayer and worship."; Orthodox proverb: "We know where the Church is, we do not know where it is not."
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We recently made a significant addition to the Experimental search engine. You now have the ability to create AI-generated summaries of any search result, as you can see in the screenshot below.
So three questions:
- Do you find these summaries accurate?
- Do they make it quicker for you to get answers to your questions or see whether an article is relevant?
- Do they make it easier for you to see whether a book you don't own is relevant and helpful for you?
To generate a summary for any search result, hover over the snippet and click the Summarize button which will appear next to the thumbs up/down indicators.
This is experimental, so any and all feedback is helpful.
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Wow!! Answers to your questions:
1. Yes!
2. Yes!
3. Yes!
Can we have this ("Summarize") as a separate function available as a button, for us to summarize any blob of text (a section, a chapter, an article, a whole book)?
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