Topical Search

[ethan.jarrell]

I've been really annoyed for some time about how hard it is to find talks and scriptures on topics I'm interested in. If I search for something like "faith", I just get a wall of results that are hard to sort through, and that doesn't really account for material outside of the church canon like BYU Speeches et.

Also, it's impossible to search for multiple topics to see how the relate to each other, which is something I've always wanted to be able to do. For example, if I'm assigned to give a talk on "faith", and I want to explore and brainstorm different ways I could take the talk, it would be nice to have a way to explore the related topics other than just scrolling down the incredibly not user friendly topical guide. It would be nice to have some sort of tool to see all the topics that relate to something I'm researching or studying, and to be able to see how it relates to other topics. This would be great for both talk preparation and just personal study in general.

So I just made a site that does that.

http://scrybe.ejarrell.com/

I'd love to see the church actually do something like this. I set it up with FAISS, the same technology Facebook Uses for fast searching based on indexed data. And I did a lot of NLP and Machine Learning to connect topics to each other and existing talks to basically build a network of the way topics, talks and scriptures are interconnected. It's free to use unless someone tells me I have to shut it down for whatever reason. That's why I don't actually have full talks on there. It just references talks and pulls quotes from the talks, so it's more of a topic and quote finder, as you'll still have to go to the actual source to read the full talk. This has just been a personal/passion project of mine, and something I've been showing to potential employers as I'm currently out of work.

[sbradshaw]

Very cool. I like how it corrects terms to the closest relevant term available (using AI, I assume). For example, I put in "pizza" and "Utah" and it updated it to "Olive Press" and "Brigham Young."