Dwell Offers Improved Website Search

Dwell's website offers a wealth of information, giving users from around the world access to thousands of teachings, scholarly and practical essays and classes, and information about Dwell’s many ministries and activities. But the information you’re looking for has been, at times, hard to find through normal site searching. The website’s complexity and sheer volume of information–over 1000 pages–has limited the value of a conventional website search.

Thanks to improvements made by Dwell’s Information Communications and Technology staff, you can now easily narrow down your search to the particular type of resource you’re looking for, and you’ll be able to reach the right information using a range of words or terms, instead of the precise language used on the website.

Dwell Senior Web Developer Marco Moreno says the new features make your search more user-friendly and effective. “We are using Google as our search engine as we had done before, but we've enhanced usability by breaking up search results into several categories, utilizing synonyms, and improving its appearance and interaction.” 

Now when you search, you’ll be presented with categories for your results–teachings, essays, classes, etc.--to help you find what you’re looking for. This allows you to immediately eliminate many search results that are irrelevant.

Another improvement is aimed at helping you find a particular teaching from among the thousands on the website. In the past, teachings have been hard to locate because their web page often didn’t contain much text–the basis of web searches. Marco says Dwell has added summaries and keywords for each teaching, giving you more text to search, to lead you to the right teaching. “In the future, we intend to implement an advanced search feature specifically for teachings to further these goals. We're striving to continue enhancing the content of our pages in order to improve search results.”

Additionally Dwell has added synonyms for common searches, helping to get you to the information you’re looking for, even if you’re not using the exact term used on our website. While our website uses the term “home church,” you’ll also reach that information if you search for “home group” or even  “small group” as they’re often called in other churches. 

The changes also improve the autofill feature, customizing suggestions for common searches on our site, as well as unique terms used by Dwell.

Please check out the improved search engine by clicking on the magnifying glass in the top right corner of the page. We welcome your feedback!