I have had the same issue-as a child, I learned KJV scriptures. The archaic language combined with (shameful) disuse results in imprecise scripture searches.

So I always had gone to google to look up, "study to show thyself approved", then plugged the reference (2 Timothy 2) into Accordance.

Irritating but doable.

However, this afternoon I read the "Who's your daddy" post on this blog and immediately created a "Search All - English - All Bibles" tab. Now, looking up "study to show thyself approved' locates the scripture. Unfortunately it found the NET version... not KJV... but at least it was found!

Not perfect but better.

joel

As for whether Google really does ignore common words, I get mixed results. I get what appear to be the same results for both vows "Jewish wedding" and vows Jewish wedding, but you're right that if I enter Jewish and or Jewish of it seems to search for phrases including both words. Perhaps when common words are used by themselves Google treats them as part of a phrase. I have learned that with Google, I can't always predict the results, because no one outside Google really knows what all the rules are. 

By the way, using for in Accordance should still translate well into Google. "A" is a common word too.

Your post was well said.

EXACTLY --> "When searching the text of the Bible, defaulting to a broad search will often return too many false positives, leaving you to wade through lots of extraneous hits to find the results you're looking for."

As for why most of us rarely go very deeply into Google search results, that is due in part to how well Google ranks the results, and in part to how impatient we are with wading through lots of hits. If we don't find what we want in the first couple of pages, the subsequent results usually become much less relevant, and we end up tweaking the search. Unfortunately, Google's syntax is actually pretty arcane for anything beyond simple searches, and few people bother to learn its intricacies. As you yourself noted, few people even realize that common words are ignored.

Now, with respect to having to translate back and forth between Google searches and Accordance searches, I'd recommend you actually try the searches you gave. If you paste vows "Jewish wedding" into Accordance, then click the All words option, you'll get vows "Jewish wedding". Accordance ignores the quotation marks, so this search will actually work without further tweaking.

Of course, this search is not really what you want, since your quotation marks indicate you want the phrase "Jewish wedding." To get the search you want, you can double-click the second AND and delete it. Now, perhaps we can improve the Google translation so that it does not add AND between words within quotation marks. We'll see.

Regardless, you can then take the search vows "Jewish wedding" and paste it right into Google. Remember, Google ignores common words like "and" so you don't need to reverse translate it at all. I think you'll find that the improvement you initially dismissed as a "hack" will actually make it much easier to do what you want to do.

Hope this helps.

To throw in my two coins: there's definitely a learning curve with searching in Accordance, but once I got the hang of it (practice makes perfect, and Dr J's Lighting the Lamp podcast was a huge help: http://www.accordancebible.com/site/resources/multimedia/podcast/), I could appreciate the power that flows from the logic. Because Accordance is meant for a range of users, the Accordance logic of search forms the core of its strength, I think. If I wanted to search a Bible version Google-style, I just switch over to Google to get the verse reference, and plunge back into Accordance again. Maybe I don't need to do that now with the latest Googlian tweak.

I think learning the Accordance logic has also helped me in my Bible study -- it's important to see Scripture not as a resource you dip in and out of (like the Internet), and more than a collection of words and phrases and sentences, or even verses (hence the joke that John the apostle would have no idea what we're talking about if we ran up to him to discuss the import of John 3:16.).

So that's why I think Accordance logic is great for BIble searches. There was yet another learning curve for searching tools, which was a bit discouraging, but I've come to appreciate the usefulness of choosing between Titles and English content, for example.

While we are on the topic of the Google generation, I think searching could learn a lot from Google. When I search Google I get results ordered in terms or relevance, with an excerpt of the bit that matches, and some summary information. When I search in Accordance, I've got to navigate all those tiny expansion triangles. Then I don't get an excerpt. If I click them to see the context I end up with a zillion tabs. There is no ordering results by relevance (e.g. in a title is better than in the text.) And it would nicer if you didn't have to wait for the entire search to finish before you could start scanning excerpts of the results.

This situation is made worse, because of the way Accordance splits things up. The Church Fathers are split across three modules. The Greek bible is split up across separate NT and OT modules, and the way of navigating from a search of one module is very different to the way of navigating from a search of multiple modules. I find the multi-module search annoying enough that I'd rather just search 3 books of church fathers separately.

The same goes for searching bible versions for a phrase. If I think I remember a verse but can't remember what version it is in the way I remember it, I'd like to see the results of search all bibles with the matching verse without having to open tabs for every result, close the tab, etc etc. Give me the Google generation.

I don't think Google users have any idea that "of" is ignored by Google. That's something they probably need to do when indexing a zetabyte of information. What googlers expect is an AND search.

But you see, its not just Google. It's iTunes. It's iPhoto. It's Finder. And by extension, pretty much EVERY Mac application is starting to acquire search boxes with AND implied. So you could call it the Mac generation too. Oh, and Windows Vista and 7 have acquired the same search boxes. So its now the Windows generation. You might as well say its the computing generation.

I mean, its quite common for me to search Google AND Accordance for a topic. I might search Google for 

vows "Jewish Wedding"

and my starting point for searching Accordance would be to cut my search out of Google and paste it into Accordance. Then probably forget that the syntax is different at least once, and fix it up. Then I might modify it a bit to be "wedding ceremony Jewish" or something. Then I'll paste it back to Google, and have to reverse translate it.