Wordsearch

Editors Note: Lifeway has discontinued Wordsearch, and has sold the property to Faithlife, publishers of Logos (and Verbum) Bible study software. As of September 2020, the Wordsearch product is no longer available. Wordsearch user accounts, including all library resources and most user data, have been migrated to Logos, and Wordsearch license holders have been provided comparable editions of the superior Logos application. Since this page is linked to by various Internet sites, it is being kept live for legacy reference.

Wordsearch Bible Software: Product Evaluation

Current & Prior Versions

The current major version (Wordsearch 12) was released in May 2018. It is the third major version release since the product was sold to Lifeway in July of 2011. Remarkably, it introduces very little over the almost three years since version 11: a new Lexicon Explorer window, some half-baked integration with OneDrive, and a couple other tweaks. I discussed the new features in a new features of version 11 in late 2015.

Version 10 (December 2011, with feature update 10.5 in June 2012) was mostly an effort at incorporating features similar to those in the QuickVerse program which WORDsearch had purchased in May of 2011, just prior to the company’s own sale to Lifeway in July. New features included a morphological search tool linked to a Friberg-tagged UBS4 Greek text, Info and History windows, user-built “books”, a Sermons & Illustrations content management tool, an odd verse/passage-based search tool called Verse Explorer, Desktop Templates to help with window management, and Twitter integration, of all things.

Prior to being taken over by Lifeway, WORDsearch had released three versions integrating and improving upon functionality from a legacy, STEP-based WORDsearch platform, and an HTML/XML-based platform adopted from the former Epiphany Software Bible Explorer application, which WORDsearch had bought in 2003. No trace remains of WORDsearch software developed before version 7 (published in November 2004).

The evaluation here runs through build 12.0.0.38 of the Windows desktop app, published on May 23, 2018. I will also touch on the Wordsearch IOS app, evaluated on both iPad and iPhone at version 3.5.0, and on the Wordsearch functionality available at www.mywsb.com.

High-Level Assessment

To cut to the chase up-front, Wordsearch has been for several years, in my opinion, a program that consists of lots of great ideas, which too seldom get finished or fleshed out to their capacity. My first computer Bible Study application was a DOS version of WORDsearch that came on 3.5″ floppy discs, purchased at a CBD Warehouse Sale in early 1993. I believe I’ve owned and used every version since then. My Bible study was rejuvenated when I picked up the radically revised WORDsearch 7  in November of 2004. But a lot of the tools in that new version didn’t work quite right, and the application would frequently fail catastrophically. Those problems have improved somewhat over time, but it remains a pattern down to this day. When Lifeway bought the application seven years ago, I was hoping the new management would develop a more polished product, but it just hasn’t materialized.

That being said, used as a simple Bible Study tool, Wordsearch is actually a fairly sleek product, and some users might wonder why I believe it lacks polish. For simple tasks, the overall interface is clean and pretty self-explanatory. Navigating the Bible is done using a familiar tree-type control located in a collapsible vertical TOC pane, or by using a very handy verse-picker navigation drop-down box which works much like date-picker controls familiar from other applications or web sites. That navigation box also accepts keyboard input, if you want to just type in a reference and go. Bible navigation is very easy in Wordsearch, but the vertical scroll bars do not provide a way to move beyond chapter boundaries – an odd omission to have not fixed for the decade and a half the program has used the current interface.

As indicated above, this basic interface has been developed from the HTML/XML-based technical foundation of the old Bible Explorer application from Epiphany Software, which WORDsearch bought in 2003, adopting it as a replacement for its old STEP-based program. Their challenge has been in scaling that effectively simple application to the demands of a functionally complex system of tools supporting a large library of integrated resources.

User-Created Content Tools

If there’s anything that sets Wordsearch apart from the competition these days, it would be in the variety of tools and options available to support user-created content. The oldest such tool is a basic text editor, called the Word Processor, taken over from Bible Explorer. Very basic, and lacking common features such as an auto-save capability (the lack of which can lead to data loss in an application as historically flaky as WORDsearch!), the tool creates HTML files stored within the PC’s “My Documents” file system (and hence perfectly usable outside the program), and which are searchable within the program. Likewise, externally created HTML files are editable and searchable within Wordsearch. PDF files also appear as Documents within the program, though they are not searchable.

This HTML editor, whether as a stand-alone window or as an annotation pane attached to the bottoms of various other tools, automatically converts Biblical references to hyperlinks which provide pop-up windows of Biblical text on mouse-hover, or open the default Bible to the passage on mouse-click. However, the application does that by using (and trapping) an Internet URL pointing to a crossbooks.com website that has been dead for years, limiting the usefulness of the documents outside the program, since other applications are obviously not trapping that URL, but rather will try to open the useless Internet address of the link.

Indeed, all the links to Bibles or other books exported from the program similarly point to dead URLs. It is precisely that kind of almost-working-but-never-quite-there quality that has soured me on WORDsearch over the years. The reason for this particular sloppy execution is rooted in basic design decisions made well over a decade ago and now deeply embedded in their products – I get that – but WORDsearch lost me when I realized they were more invested in doing things like porting Mac and mobile versions of the app – and incorporating Twitter tweeting! – than they were in going back to overhaul the Bible Explorer and CROSS format core, to improve the program’s real weaknesses. This is the kind of thing I’m referring to when I say the program lacks polish.

Another old user content “document” is the Verse List, which was introduced in version 7 (2004), and remains largely unchanged since then. These are used to collect and group Biblical verses. They are flexible in how they can do that, and can attach local annotations to either individual list entries (which can be either single verses or ranges), or to the header for any grouping sub-sections of the Verse List document. These data objects would be greatly enhanced by the ability to export, or even by a better report generator to prepare for printing – as it stands, they can only be printed like web pages, using the kludgy Internet Explorer printing interface.

A Biblical annotation tool was developed for version 8 (2007), called Bible Notes or Notebooks, which allow for the creation of several independent notebooks of annotations. Each annotation is linked to a verse or a range (i.e. not to a specific translation), and creates a selectable flag within Bibles at the corresponding location, which can be used to quickly retrieve an annotation. What is not quick is creating an annotation from a particular passage: you cannot simply select a passage and create an annotation for it, you must open up a notebook and create a new annotation, assigning it the correct passage/verse reference. This, I would think, must be exactly the opposite of how most people think and work. The Notebook tool provides optional syncing to the four available window synchronization groups, multiple means of navigation, and an internal text search mechanism. These notes, however, are not searchable outside the tool. Based on verse reference, annotation content can be exported in the Instant Verse Study tool, but not in either of the other reference-driven search tools (see Searching below). A similar export can be performed via the application’s main File menu, which uses a new internal HTML document as the export target. The Notebooks windows are not dockable to other windows.

Since version 10.5 (2012), users can create their own “User Books”, a data object type taken over from QuickVerse. These dockable windows can be of three kinds: organized by either Biblical reference (commentary type), topical headword (dictionary type), or date (journal/calendar/devotional type). They can be awkward to get used to, but they do the job. However, the content of the “books” is neither searchable nor importable. Nor can links be created to the content of these books. Exporting works better, as there is a serviceable report generator sitting in front of the Print Preview function for User Books, which allows for a degree of customization and filtering before sending either to print or to an HTML file.

Beginning with the original release of version 10 (2011), the program offers a “Sermon and Illustrations” management tool, which facilitates the centralization of prepared teaching/preaching content, providing for tracking usage history, and filtering entries on user-created topical tags to help find old, usable content from prior work. It also has a field for entering related Scripture, but it does not appear to support searching for or filtering on those entries, except as plain text! The other search tools cannot search the content of these notes, nor is there an export capability. The editor includes a clickable button for creating a hyperlink within the documents, but it doesn’t work – even seven years after the tool was developed.

Version 11 (2015) introduced the NoteStacks tool. This seems to be a somewhat improved Sermons and Illustrations tool, but with a broader and more general applicability. It can also serve nicely as an improved tool for annotating non-Biblical books, which still come with a simple but a problematic, unreliably designed annotation pane dating back before WORDsearch to Bible Explorer. If you’re a heavy WORDsearch user and note-taker, this tool would be a significant improvement over earlier versions. I provided an assessment of this tool in a blog post shortly after it was released. The printing function for this tool is crude, but the “Copy” function from the main NoteStacks dialog is an effective export function for copying one or more complete note objects to a word processor, and the tool has note importing and exporting capability, which uses a proprietary file format. There are several ways to group and filter entries, and the interface is a little kludgy, and so it has a bit of a learning curve, but this is a nice knowledge management tool. The window is, unfortunately, not dockable (and therefore can’t be moved to a second display).

Searching

Wordsearch 12 retains the eight different searching interfaces inherited from the prior version. These consist of: (1) the primary text search dialog box, which doubles as a Strong’s Number search tool; internal text searching boxes in the (2) Parallel Bible and (3) Bible Notes windows; (4) a Greek morphology search wizard; (5) a “Topic Explorer” that searches for article headwords in dictionary-type resources; and three tools for searching based on Biblical references: (6) Cross Reference Explorer; (7) Instant Verse Study; and (8) Verse Explorer.

The primary text searching tool (Search) is very fast and reasonably accurate. It is the same function for searching Bibles or other resources, and Bible context filtering (e.g. search New Testament books only, etc.) will limit the results returned both from Bibles and from other resources organized by B-C-V (Book-Chapter-Verse), such as commentaries. Search terms can include the usual array of words, “phrases”, explicit or implied Boolean expressions, and Strong’s numbers. Another frustrating application limitation inherited from Bible Explorer long ago: Biblical search scope filtering can be set only to contiguous ranges (e.g. you can successfully filter to only see results from Matthew through John, or Romans through Philemon, but you cannot filter to see only results from both Luke and Acts). Only one Search Results window instance exists, so if you run a second search, your first results are replaced. Biblical reference results can be exported to a Verse List, but other results can only be marked for printing, or for copying to the clipboard to paste into a document. The Results screen offers a “Jump to…” dialog box which shows a categorized view of resources included in the results, which are, in the main Search Results window, just a list of relevant resources, ordered either alphabetically or by hit count.

Originally upgraded to its current form as part of version 8 (2007), the Parallel Bible tool is one of the outstanding elements of Wordsearch, and it includes an internal text search function. The window itself facilitates the synchronous display and scrolling of a theoretically unlimited number of Bible versions (you will in reality, of course, be limited by screen space and purchasing power). In “column mode”, the displayed verses are blocked off in a table format to produce both vertical and horizontal visual consistency, while allowing each verse to remain nestled in its literary context. “Row mode” lines up the versions vertically, easing detailed comparisons. This tool is the best I’m aware of for comparing translations on a verse-by-verse basis.

The text search in this tool utilizes a simple text entry box, and accepts single words, “phrases”, or Boolean expressions, as well as Strong’s numbers formatted like <G312>. Results are found for any of the Bibles active in the Parallel Bible window, and the tool offers results views that are either filtered on hits (show only verses where at least one translation uses the search term), or shown “in context”, meaning that it continues to show the entire Biblical text, but with search hits highlighted, and with navigation buttons provided to move back and forth through the list of hits. The Parallel Bible tool supports copying (to clipboard) or exporting to Verse Lists, prompting for selection of translations to include, but it does not allow for the simultaneous selection of non-contiguous verses, which can make exporting unnecessarily tedious.

The Bible Notes search facility is a simple text search for word, “phrase”, or Boolean expression. Results are returned within the Bible Notes window, which provides a toggle to switch views back and forth from notes to search results, although the toggle setup uses two very different click targets, which are awkwardly implemented.

The Morphological Explorer, first published as part of release 10 in December of 2011, is a reconstruction of the Greek search tool from QuickVerse, utilizing a wizard-type interface, which shows Friberg-tagged UBS4 occurrences of selected Greek roots matching the morphological characteristics selected from a display of appropriate options. This is really more of a UBS4 filtering tool than a search tool. Roots are typically defined in the lookup via executing right-click options on Greek words in various resources to “Explore Morphology” of the selected word. There is no way within the Morph tool to manually type or paste a root to explore, though they can be selected from a scrolled list. Through version 11, the tool offered a button to copy, to print, or to export selected results to a Verse List, but the functions never worked, and the button has been removed from version 12. This is an inferior Greek analytical tool, but serves its purpose: Wordsearch users are not typically looking for much original language capability from the program.

Another feature introduced in WS8 (2007), the Topic Explorer is a search tool that searches for article headings, as opposed to searching for words within the bodies of articles. These headings could include dictionary entries, or chapter titles, or several other kinds of text, but the point is that the results will be considerably filtered compared to a free-text search, and should provide more focused results. The search scope is, by default, all books in the library containing the right kind of data (i.e. English headwords), but it can also be further limited to resources defined in user-created “Collections”. The search term can be manually entered within the window, or a Topic Explorer search can be triggered via executing a right-click option to perform a “Topical Search for…” on a selected word in any resource, including user documents. It’s a fairly quick search tool, which provides several display options for organizing the resulting resources, and also provides a preview pane, which is much more functional than the static snippets returned by the standard Search tool. The original resource can be accessed via an “Open in new window” button above the preview pane. Text can be copied from the preview pane, but results cannot really be exported or saved, and the resulting resources list cannot be edited. This tool is designed for previewing resources, which would then be opened for study if desired.

Instant Verse Study, Verse Explorer, and Cross-reference [XRef] Explorer are all similar tools for finding content related to selected Biblical passages, but there are some significant differences between them. The oldest of them is the XRef Explorer, introduced in WS8 (2007). This search tool returns an organized list of links to sections of books which contain references to a single search verse entered either via a standard verse navigation combo-box at the top of the tool, or as driven by optional membership in a Sync Group, which, for the sake of system performance, should really only be done if a smallish number of resources are loaded into the XRef Explorer search scope. The search scope, by default, is all books, though you can manage the scope by designating a “Collection” of resources as the search scope. The search engine searches the body of resources for references to the verse being searched for, so results can be pretty promiscuous. The results list is organized according to library Category of the resources. Basically a sister-tool to the Topic Explorer, the XRE is likewise a stand-alone, un-dockable, two-pane window, with the list of results in either the left/top pane, and a content preview pane to the right/bottom. Search terms are generally highlighted in the preview pane to assist navigation, though sometimes hits can be hard to find in the preview text. Like the TE window, the preview pane offers a button that will launch the previewed resource in a new window.

The Instant Verse Study (IVS) tool is a dialog box for selecting resources to generate a report of content related to a Biblical verse or range of verses, which is copied to the clipboard for pasting into a word processor document. The Search scope is limited by design to resources indexed by Bible reference (B-C-V), such as Bibles, Personal Bible Notes, and library resources that are organized like commentaries, which would also include things like Study Bible Notes, Bible Outlines and Handbook, and some verse-by-verse word study books (e.g. Vincent’s Word Studies). The search scope can be loaded by individual selection, but it is really designed to be loaded by picking a Collection, and also has the ability to create new Collections from the IVS dialog. One peculiar trait of this tool is that it will not only return content for in-scope resources which have a section dealing with the search verse, but will also create an entry for selected resources with blank results, indicating specifically that no results were found. It does not provide citations for exported content, but only a header with the resource name and search referent. The IVS tool does not return legible results from Bibles written in non-Latin characters, but does properly copy such characters from commentaries. This is the only one of the Bible reference lookup tools that can be launched from a right-click option within Bibles.

Something of a combination of the Instant Verse Study and Topic Explorer tools, the Verse Explorer is the most complex of these three Scripture reference lookup tools, and the one most in need of an interface overhaul – the tool’s start screen consists of printed instructions for use. The search term entry box is, I believe, the only such box in the program that is not the standard WS Bible Navigation tool. The search scope selection dialog does not interact with Collections, so every selection/deselection is manual, and there are no ordering options or other navigation assistance available. Once you run the search, the resulting screen is very well done, and easy to use for both exploring results and for returning to edit the search scope, but it can take some time to figure out how the book selection process really works, as the multi-tab dialog has overlapping resources, and can be confusing. The fact is that the six selection tabs relate directly to six sections into which the results are organized on the page, and which consists almost entirely of links to resources (i.e. no preview pane). There is no export function.

The first section (Bibles) of results displays the actual Biblical text of the search referent in each of the translations selected on the first tab. Translation selection is critical in this tool, because the resulting verse translations provide the English words which will form the search terms driving the results of the next three sections on the page. Neither Greek nor Hebrew (nor interlinear) texts are available to select here – this is a tool geared toward verse-specific commentary, and English words.

The second section (Dictionaries & Encyclopedias) contains links to entries in any of the library resources selected in the corresponding second tab which contain entries for the English words included in the translations displayed in section one. In other words, this section shows search results against selected books from your Dictionaries & Encyclopedias category which match the words used in the translations you chose in the first section.

The third section (Word Studies) acts just like the second, looking up the words from the translated verses in section one, but it looks them up against the books in your library’s Word Studies category. Remember that it is English words being looked up, since original language texts are not supported in this tool, so the Word Studies resource would have to be indexed on English terms in order to produce a result in this tool.

The fourth section (Topics) works exactly like the preceding two, except that it queries books indexed for English terms which are in all categories other than the categories used on the preceding two sections. Between the three sections, you get essentially the same results of Topic Explorer searches, but searching at once for all the usable words in all the translations selected in section one, as opposed to searching for one word at a time, such as you would have to so in Topic Explorer.

The fifth section does not look up words, but, like the IVS tool, searches commentaries and other resources with B-C-V indexes, to find content related to the initially supplied Biblical reference.

Section six looks up the Biblical reference in any selected Cross Reference resource, and displays the actual results at the reference for those resources, instead of just returning links. This XRef section is great. I’d love to see a mini-window spun off of this tool containing just the Bibles and XRef sections, with the window having the ability to join a Sync Group – it would be fantastic as a follow-along window for comparison while reading/studying.

Primary Resources

Most of the major English Bible translations are available, along with several more obscure versions. Notably absent, however, is the New American Bible, which disappeared from the WORDsearch catalog around the time the NAB “revised edition” update was published. Side-by-side comparisons can be very effectively performed in several formats (including using Greek & Hebrew texts). I have not found a Bible Study program that does as good a job of providing effective means of viewing versions in parallel.

Original language capability is not the primary focus of Wordsearch, but a reasonable collection of lexicons and other original language supports is available for their English-first audience, often accessible via Strong’s tagging of texts, which includes both stand-alone and interlinear Greek and Hebrew texts. The interlinear texts, based on BHS5 (with Westminster morphology) and UBS4 (with Friberg morphology), are very useful for the English-first student looking to peek under the covers at the original language texts, and include audio links to hear pronunciations of the aforementioned Strong’s tag. The underwhelming Greek “Morph Explorer” for the UBS4 with Friberg morphology was noted above. No similar tool exists for the Hebrew text. The recent addition of the Rahlfs-Hanhart Septuagint fills a long-standing gap in the Wordsearch library offerings.

Secondary Resources

Wordsearch offers a decent range of top-shelf academic works in terms of dictionaries, lexicons, and commentaries, as well as many lesser-weight offerings. This includes the fairly recent additions of numerous critical commentaries to their offerings, such as NICOT/NICNT, NIGNT, WBC, ZEC, and Hermeneia. However, their focus is decidedly toward the expository and even devotional end of the spectrum rather than the exegetical and academic side. They’ve also rolled the old NavPress LESSONmaker back into the program. Wordsearch is a library-oriented program geared toward preachers, particularly those of the American brand of evangelicalism. So, there’s lots of sermon outlines and sermon collections available to go along with all the exposition and application-oriented works. There also seems to be a too-heavy presence of 19^th century works cluttering the library. At this point, it is pretty much a Southern Baptist product. I imagine most Christians could find an appropriate set of useful resources within their offerings, although their pre-packaged bundles seem rather narrowly focused. 

Window Management & User Interface

Overall, window management capabilities – from linking & syncing, to desktop layout and navigation controls  – are adequate, but not much more than that. Four available Sync Groups are enough, and a Master/Slave option for managing them (called Group Driver) is an excellent idea. Also, I’ve mentioned above the verse picker navigation available in almost all Scripture-oriented windows: I’ll mention it again, it’s terrific. Linking between windows doesn’t always completely work – if a resource is open but not selected in a docked window that is not the active window, triggering a link to the resource seems to move it to the selected status within the docked window set, but does not make the window active, meaning it does not have focus, and could remain buried behind another window. It should bring the resource to the front, like it does if the resource is closed when it is triggered. I’ve also never seen my “Middle Liddell” sync to other Greek works. The navigation History window works fine. The Info window is actually just a stripped-down Bible viewer that replaces pop-up windows that otherwise appear when you hover over a Biblical link in a window. I’ve treated the tabbed interface and the rest of the new “look & feel” introduced with WORDsearch 11 in a blog post, so I will not repeat it here.

Window arranging, unfortunately, is done either completely automatically, or completely manually. By now, it should have been made possible for a user to impose a layout design to which automatic docking conformed. One huge contributing deficiency is that many window types cannot even be docked with other windows, which also means they cannot be moved to the “2^nd monitor” display introduced in version 11. The tools lacking docking ability, and thus that cannot be moved to the second window, include: Documents/Word Processor; Verse Lists; Topic Explorer; Xref Explorer; Morphological Explorer; Verse Explorer; Bible Notes; Sermons & Illustrations window; NoteStacks window; Word Definition window; History window; Info window; and web browser window. Nor can you place your Search Results window in the second pane. Nor can you show your Library tab in the second window.

Other areas of the interface where Wordsearch has long been in need of improvement include the management of Collections, and the management of saved layouts, which is currently handled by a combination of the concepts of Desktops and Templates. Templates were introduced in version 10 as an apparent attempt to correct or compensate for some of the weaknesses in the design of Desktops, but it would have been better to keep it simple, and just fix Desktops. Historically, Desktops have represented not simply saved layouts of resources, as one sees in other applications, but were also used to store (and segregate from other Desktops) user data such as annotations and highlighting. There are better options available now for annotations not tied to particular Desktops, but highlighting still belongs to a specific “Desktop”, rather than to the user who did the highlighting. Furthermore, my recent efforts to consolidate and simplify my Desktops environment in Wordsearch 12, by moving my management of “WindowState” content to Templates utilized within a minimal set of Desktops, has precipitated another round of on-going catastrophic application failures, which seem to be linked to my use of multiple, different-sized monitors. Professional software should just handle those kinds of circumstances without blowing up.

Wordsearch for iPad/iPhone and the Web

The IOS version offering from Wordsearch is an odd duck, and indicative of the half-baked nature of Wordsearch in general. After logging into the IOS applet, the library will be populated with most of the titles in your Wordsearch library, but the categories under which the books are organized are different from the categories used in the desktop application. Some category assignments will be the same, but many are different – there appears have been a completely independent process of categorization. Worse, the books are not synced with the CROSS books on the desktop platform. If you apply highlighting or a note to a book in your Wordsearch IOS app, it will be synced across all your IOS devices, but it will not be synced with your desktop app! Likewise notes and bookmarks.

The library organization of the web version (www.mywsb.com) appears the same as the IOS version, at least at a glance, and the available annotation tools are very similar, but, again, the annotations are not synced between www.mywsb.com and either the IOS or desktop environments. Three different platforms, three different sets of notes. Yuk!

The functionality of the IOS app seems limited to the annotation functions mentioned in the preceding paragraph. The website is much the same functionally, except that it adds a serviceable Word Study Tool pane, and a decent Parallel [Bible] Tool – plus it provides much more screen real estate. iPad users might be better off using the website via their browser, rather than using the IOS app, though you still won’t be synced with your desktop version.

Recommendation

At this point, I’ve thoroughly moved on from Wordsearch to Logos, perhaps primarily because of the latter’s on-going commitment to publishing important Catholic resources, but also because of its superior core application stability, predictive context menu options, original language capabilities, and my vastly higher confidence level in platform longevity and in the value of my investment in their proprietary eBooks. Although I still run Wordsearch for some of the commentary resources I have in CROSS format, I stopped creating user data in it quite a while ago – primarily because of application instability, but also because the tools invariably lack a proper finishing polish, and there are no signs at this point that they will ever be improved upon. However, I still find Wordsearch to be the best program I own for displaying parallel Biblical texts.

I can no longer recommend it to fellow Catholics (as I could and did previously), but users from non-magisterial faith communities looking for a basic, relatively inexpensive English-language Bible Study software could find this program adequate, especially owing to the generally user-friendly interface, and the wealth of options for user-generated content management. If the available content suits your needs, and you don’t plan on driving it too hard, the application should suffice. It is not a high-end or even medium-end tool for original language study by any means, but it gives the generalist enough information to drill into the Word. The serious instability problems that plagued it during earlier versions have been partially, but not wholly, overcome, and this platform still needs an awful lot of improvement, professionalizing, and functional convergence to make it a good bet for serious investment. Whether that is going to happen under SBC/Lifeway management and the entrenched technical leadership remains to be seen.