New LDS.org Search

For several years LDS.org has used Google technology for its search engine. Google provided a limited product that didn't have the same good relevance as public Google. Complaints have always been seen, "Make it like Google." Well it was Google but couldn't take advantage of all the relevance "signals" that public Google uses. Google recently terminated their Google Appliance offering for all companies forcing the Church to migrate to another search technology. On Dec 27, 2018 we launched the new search engine that uses Microsoft Bing technology. Our tests have shown the relevance is greatly improved over the former Google offering. Complaints have gone way down. Try it out. We are still working with Microsoft to put in more features for us and fix some problems.

For searching the scriptures make sure you still use the on-page search box on www.lds.org/scriptures. That uses a very specialized scriptures search because Google and Bing just can't search the scriptures well.

The update fixed my favorite bug... It used to be that if you searched for "I Stand All Amazed," it would show results for "I Stand Tall Amazed" instead.

I have always used public Google to search lds.org and it's sub domains using search operators such as "site:" and "inurl:".

I've never considered using th search the scriptures box. Thanks for pointing this out.

I don't know if this is a good place to post this, or not, but I couldn't find a general email for LDS.org website folks.

I visit LDS.org at least six times each day, using my Mac.

Just now, I was looking up something for my Primary lesson next week and used the search word PRAYER, and the results returned hits for places outside of LDS.org.

The hits returned links to DICTIONARY.COM, BIBLESTUDYTOOLS.COM, FOCUSONTHEFAMILY.COM, SPIRITUALLEADERSHIP.COM, NEWADVENT.COM, CHRISTIANANSWERS.NET, GRACE-BIBLE.ORG, CROSSWALK.COM, EWTN.COM, USCCB.ORG, and many, many others.

And I was able to replicate the results time after time. It wasn't just a one-time thing.

I have a screenshot, attached. Does anyone know if this is something new?

aprilreinhardt wrote:I don't know if this is a good place to post this, or not, but I couldn't find a general email for LDS.org website folks.

I moved your post to a more relevant thread. I suspect it was an unintended consequence of the changed announced in the first post.

I tried this and couldn't reproduce it. I even tried going directly to the URL in your screen shot. Can anyone else reproduce this behavior?

I wasn't able to reproduce it either... interesting bug.

I did notice that I got results from other church websites, not just lds.org. But I wasn't able to duplicate that.

I'll have to try again at home. I wonder if having Edge open to a regular search page will color the results (some kind of bleed over from other open pages.) Or, perhaps changing my default search engine.

russellhltn wrote:I did notice that I got results from other church websites, not just lds.org.

Based on what I know about the search implementation, that is expected.

Under the covers we now use Microsoft's Bing (since the first of the year) because Google discontinued their offering for companies. Our search is supposed to be limited to very specific Church sites but we have seen very rare instances where Bing is bleeding through some non-Church sites. It happened yesterday for a few people. We are taking this very seriously and working with Microsoft.