Word
About Word

Word is an Internet search engine for the scripture of four major religions: the Islamic Qur'an, the Jewish Tanakh, the Christian New Testament, and eleven Hindu Upanishads. These scriptures are the basis for a relationship to the eternal; Word is a new interface to scripture.

The goals of this project are:

To present scripture as a single text
These four texts are of the highest importance to humankind, whether received and transcribed by a messenger or themselves "uncreated" and existing eternally. And yet they have rarely been brought together. Word presents these texts in a single digital omnibus to provide a simultaneous experience of some of the world's most sacred texts.

To create a new interface between readers and scripture
Scholars have always attempted to acquire privileged insight by reading scripture in new ways: analyzing it, interpreting it, even converting characters to numbers or counting the frequency of key words. Word presents a simple new strategy: to search through four different texts simultaneously. Word is a search engine to find meaning hidden in plain sight, motivated by the hope that an answer exists.

To explore new possibilities
Find common themes, points of departure, contradictions, and confirmations: Word is a tool -- use it to search for anything. Atomic Software releases it as an experiment in creative engineering and network publishing. As the site evolves, we plan to add new features and capabilities, such as showing the most popular searches and matches, and presenting the users' search phrases as a new kind of text. Stay tuned.


Please note that while we have drawn inspiration for the design of these pages from the best search engine on the web today, this site does not make use of any technology from nor is it affiliated with that search engine in any way, with the exception of advertising on some pages. Their interface is just really hard to improve upon.



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Adam Young, Atomic Software, 2003