Ocean 2.0

Well, not really Ocean 2.0, but we now have another program that is similar to Ocean. But better in some ways. It is called Interfaith Explorer. It has the best of both worlds – a web based search engine, and a program you can download and take with you into the disconnected world.

Online

To start searching, head on over to http://bahairesearch.com/. It is easy, just type your search terms and hit Enter:

As you’ll soon notice, there’s a fun little feature where it suggests possible searches under “Try It:”, to get you familiar with the options for searching. I found the one in the above screenshot particularly funny.

It seems to have more texts and be more up-to-date than Ocean. Hopefully maintenance will continue far into the future.

Offline

To grab the offline version, only available for Windows PCs at this time, go to this page:
http://bahairesearch.com/WinApp/Pages/Download.aspx

There you can download the main program (top link), as well as many plug-ins such as Arabic, French or Persian texts.

Once you’ve downloaded the main program, extract the contents of the Zip file and double-click on it. The resulting installer will guide you through the process of installing Interfaith Explorer on to your computer. The same process applies to the plug-ins. If you’re successful you should see this loading screen:

And this is how the main screen looks:

When you run Interfaith Explorer for the first time, and also whenever you install new texts, you will get the following message explaining that it is indexing the texts and will take a few minutes to do so, and not to be worried if it seems stuck (i.e. “Don’t Panic!”).

This version is credited to Ian Vink and Runa Ali, according to their About page. Remember, if you like it, send them a post card:

               IAN VINK
               2 Front St
               Hamilton, HM11
               Bermuda