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Seed Scroll has three search paths: fast full-text keyword search, Strong’s word search, and AI-powered semantic search that understands questions and topics. All are accessible from the same search screen. Tap the search icon in the Bible navigation bar at the top of the reader to open the search screen.

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AI-powered search (premium)

AI search lets you ask questions in plain English instead of guessing exact keywords. Examples:
  • What does the Bible say about forgiveness?
  • Verses about God’s faithfulness
  • Where does Paul talk about running a race?
  • Show me passages about the armor of God
Seed Scroll analyzes your question and returns the most relevant verses along with context. Results are ranked by relevance to your meaning, not just word overlap.
AI search requires a premium subscription. If you are on a free account, you will see an option to upgrade when you enter a question that triggers AI search.
Seed Scroll automatically decides whether your query needs AI or a standard keyword search. Queries of three or more words, or queries that start with phrases like “what does”, “show me”, or “verses about”, are treated as semantic queries and routed to AI. For shorter queries or exact phrases, Seed Scroll runs a fast local full-text search across the active supported translation. Results load from the on-device database when that translation is available offline.

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Which text is searched

Keyword search reads the text of your currently active translation only. It does not search other translations you own, and it does not search several translations at once. Switching translations does not re-run a search you have already performed. Run the search again to see results from the newly selected translation.

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How results are ordered

Results come back in two tiers:
  1. Exact matches first. Verses containing your search text as a whole-word match appear ahead of everything else.
  2. Relevance within each tier. Remaining results are ordered by full-text relevance, which weighs how distinctive your terms are and how often they occur.
Results are not in canonical Bible order. A verse in Matthew can legitimately rank above a verse in Genesis when it is the stronger match. A result’s position in the list is not a defect on its own.
Exact matching ignores punctuation. Apostrophes, quotation marks, hyphens, dashes, brackets and sentence punctuation are treated as word boundaries in both your query and the verse text, so El'ayim and El ayim behave identically. Matching is case-insensitive. Because matching is whole-word, searching light does not exact-match lightning — though relevance-ranked results below the exact tier may still include it.

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Offline behavior

Keyword and Strong’s search run entirely on the device against the downloaded translation database, so both work with no network connection once a translation is installed. AI search requires a connection, because the query is processed remotely.

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Licensed translations

A licensed translation becomes searchable once it has been purchased and installed on the device. Owning one without downloading it on the current device leaves nothing locally to search. As you type, the search screen also surfaces matching Strong’s entries — Hebrew and Greek words whose definitions match your query. Tap a Strong’s result to see the full definition and a list of every verse where that word appears.

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Filtering results by book

After searching, tap the book dropdown to filter results to a single Bible book. The count beside each book name shows how many matches it contains.

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Search history

Seed Scroll saves your recent searches locally on your device. When you open the search screen with an empty query, your recent searches appear as a list. Tap any entry to re-run that search. Tap the X beside an entry to delete it.

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Use a search result

Each verse result gives you three paths:
  • Tap the result card to open the verse in the Bible Reader.
  • Tap the bookmark icon to save that verse to Studies → Saved → Bible verses.
  • Tap the + icon to start a study from that verse. Choose Manual to create an editable study note with the verse already inserted, or choose AI-generated to draft a study from that reference.
The reader opens the exact verse in the selected translation when available. Use the back button to return to your search results. Your query and its results are still there when you come back — opening a result does not clear the search. Results are only replaced when you enter a new query, and cleared when you empty the search box.

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Work with multiple results

Tap the multi-select icon in the top bar to select more than one verse. After selecting verses, choose what you want to do with them:
  • Bookmark saves the selected verses as Bible verse bookmarks. Choose the bookmark label once, and Seed Scroll applies it to the selected verses.
  • Study opens the same manual-vs-AI study chooser. Manual creates a study note with all selected verses inserted. AI-generated drafts a study centered on those references.
  • Playlist adds the selected single-verse passages to a Bible audio playlist.
If you are looking for a specific word’s Hebrew or Greek root, use Strong’s Concordance from within the reader instead of search — it is more direct for word-level lookups.