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The Biblical Criticism Search Engine

Posted: Fri Feb 06, 2015 9:42 pm
by Peter Kirby
Now you can search the greater Biblical Criticism Blogosphere, a carefully curated collection of websites, blogs, books, articles, and resources containing about 30 billion web pages indexed and searchable with a Google Custom Search Engine. The search prompt can be found here:

http://bcharchive.org/

This Google-powered custom Internet search engine was created to sit alongside two very specific site search engines, powered by open source software and opening up the full archives of the Biblical Criticism & History forum from 2001 to today. The archives themselves are hosted at bcharchive.org (the historical portion, indexed using Gigablast search technology) and at earlywritings.com (the forum today, powered by phpBB).

I encourage you to play around with these tools! Who knows what pearls you might find?

This has been a labor of love. The historical archives have been sitting around on my hard drive, unused and unusable, for the past year and a half, since the previous incarnation of the forum shut down. It took a lot of effort to piece together a solution for browsing the pages of the old forum and searching the historical data, a substantial collection of about 75,000 HTML documents spanning 8GB. After several false starts, the Gigablast search engine technology, which went open source just a couple years ago, proved capable of taking on a job like this effectively and efficiently, using a minimum of server resources.

The custom search engine, powered by Google, includes various websites, the entire biblioblog list, and several sources of books and articles related to biblical criticism, with an attempt to include all the academically-oriented sources in English that I could find. It is strictly a whitelist filter, with over 500 filter entries, which have all been vetted for relevancy by hand.

Please send any feedback my way.

(As mentioned on my blog - http://peterkirby.com/the-biblical-crit ... ngine.html - reposted here for discussion)

Re: The Biblical Criticism Search Engine

Posted: Fri Feb 06, 2015 10:36 pm
by Stephan Huller
Very cool. If there was just someway to mold the clay into something beautiful

Re: The Biblical Criticism Search Engine

Posted: Sat Feb 07, 2015 7:24 am
by maryhelena
Peter Kirby wrote:Now you can search the greater Biblical Criticism Blogosphere, a carefully curated collection of websites, blogs, books, articles, and resources containing about 30 billion web pages indexed and searchable with a Google Custom Search Engine. The search prompt can be found here:

http://bcharchive.org/

This Google-powered custom Internet search engine was created to sit alongside two very specific site search engines, powered by open source software and opening up the full archives of the Biblical Criticism & History forum from 2001 to today. The archives themselves are hosted at bcharchive.org (the historical portion, indexed using Gigablast search technology) and at earlywritings.com (the forum today, powered by phpBB).

I encourage you to play around with these tools! Who knows what pearls you might find?

This has been a labor of love. The historical archives have been sitting around on my hard drive, unused and unusable, for the past year and a half, since the previous incarnation of the forum shut down. It took a lot of effort to piece together a solution for browsing the pages of the old forum and searching the historical data, a substantial collection of about 75,000 HTML documents spanning 8GB. After several false starts, the Gigablast search engine technology, which went open source just a couple years ago, proved capable of taking on a job like this effectively and efficiently, using a minimum of server resources.

The custom search engine, powered by Google, includes various websites, the entire biblioblog list, and several sources of books and articles related to biblical criticism, with an attempt to include all the academically-oriented sources in English that I could find. It is strictly a whitelist filter, with over 500 filter entries, which have all been vetted for relevancy by hand.

Please send any feedback my way.

(As mentioned on my blog - http://peterkirby.com/the-biblical-crit ... ngine.html - reposted here for discussion)

Great work, Peter. My thanks.

I just played around a bit with the search engines and found this gem from jakejonesiv:

A Receipe for Jesus
  • Here is a receipe for making Jesus. Take one part crucified King of the Jews (Antigonus), one part apocalyptic prophet (Jesus, son of Ananias), one part sage (legendary founder of Q?), and a whole heaping of OT tales retold and recast to supply the details for the fictional "Life." Add a dash of Homeric epic or Julius Caesar to taste. 03-08-2006.
:D

Re: The Biblical Criticism Search Engine

Posted: Sat Feb 07, 2015 7:56 am
by Stephan Huller
The world's a better place because of that discovery, Mary. Warmed my heart.

Re: The Biblical Criticism Search Engine

Posted: Sat Feb 07, 2015 8:54 am
by Roger Pearse
Very interesting - thank you.

Re: The Biblical Criticism Search Engine

Posted: Sun Feb 15, 2015 3:54 pm
by Peter Kirby
While poking around the new "talkfreethought" forum, I was able to see that I could not only retrieve the archives again, correcting for the unfortunate omission of aa/dewitness from the archives, but I could also retrieve the posts from 2001-2003 (which had been mixed with all of the other "Philosophical Forums" and thus are equal in size to the rest of 2003-2013) and also the very end of 2013, which had not been noticed before.

These can currently be browsed at http://bcharchive.org/ but the search is down until everything has been re-indexed.

Also, any existing links will have to be adjusted, hopefully for good this time.

Re: The Biblical Criticism Search Engine

Posted: Mon Feb 16, 2015 7:00 am
by Bingo
Peter Kirby wrote:Now you can search the greater Biblical Criticism Blogosphere, a carefully curated collection of websites, blogs, books, articles, and resources containing about 30 billion web pages indexed and searchable with a Google Custom Search Engine. ...
Thanks Peter.

And while I’m at it - I've been meaningto say thanks for http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/ and everything.

So thanks for everything.

Re: The Biblical Criticism Search Engine

Posted: Mon Feb 16, 2015 7:09 am
by Bingo
maryhelena wrote: I just played around a bit with the search engines and found this gem from jakejonesiv ...
Btw - whatever happened to jakejonesiv?

That guy was/is really fucking bright. His posts were always top-notch.

Re: The Biblical Criticism Search Engine

Posted: Mon Feb 16, 2015 11:07 am
by DCHindley
Bingo wrote:
maryhelena wrote: I just played around a bit with the search engines and found this gem from jakejonesiv ...
Btw - whatever happened to jakejonesiv?

That guy was/is really fucking bright. His posts were always top-notch.
Last BCH type post I can find from him was on Vridar's blog, Jul 17, 2014. There is a comment about Google doodles for a dead atheist dated 8/26/14 by a Jacob Jones IV. Then it stops dead.

Who knows ... maybe a new job is keeping him preoccupied. I got the impression that he was from Europe somewhere, maybe part of a military family, as he seems to be competent in German (and was active at H. Detering's site, www.radikalkritik.com).

I knew him on the Jesus Mysteries forum. He was well-informed but even more prone to shoot from the hip than I am.

DCH

Re: The Biblical Criticism Search Engine

Posted: Tue Feb 17, 2015 5:11 pm
by Peter Kirby
While the indexing is still underway, you can start using the search again.

http://bcharchive.org/