Building the Future of Islamic Search: How We’re Benchmarking SearchDeen Against Sunnah.com

Published: 29 July 2025
By: Mushfiqur Rahman Talha, Greentech Apps Foundation R&D Team

At Greentech Apps Foundation, we believe that accessing authentic Islamic knowledge should be as easy as a Google search. That’s why we’re building SearchDeen — a dedicated Islamic search engine designed to help Muslims around the world find reliable answers from trusted sources like the Qur’an, Hadith, and classical scholarship.

One of the most essential components of this project is getting Hadith search right. With millions of Muslims relying on platforms like Sunnah.com for daily learning, we wanted to ensure that SearchDeen meets — and eventually exceeds — the quality and relevance users expect.

To do this, we ran a comparative evaluation between SearchDeen and Sunnah.com, testing how well each platform responds to real user queries. The results? Both insightful and a bit humbling.

Why Hadith Search Matters

Hadith literature — the recorded sayings and actions of the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ — is vast, rich, and complex. Navigating it requires precise language handling, deep contextual understanding, and smart ranking algorithms. While platforms like Sunnah.com have done a phenomenal job over the years, newer tools like SearchDeen must demonstrate that they can deliver similar (or better) performance.

To do that, we built a benchmarking system using the latest techniques from the search engine world.

How We Tested It

We developed a Python-based evaluation tool that:

• Pulls real user queries (e.g. “blind sahabi”, “missed fasts”) from our Hadith app
• Fetches search results from Sunnah.com and SearchDeen
• Compares those results against a known list of relevant Hadiths
• Scores each engine using standard search metrics like MAP@10 and nDCG@10

These technical terms simply mean:
How relevant are the results?
Are the most important ones showing up at the top?

What We Found

💡 Sunnah.com still leads the way.
It consistently produced more relevant Hadith results, ranked accurately and clearly. In many cases, it got a perfect score.

🔍 SearchDeen is catching up.
Our engine struggled in some areas — especially with longer or more complex queries — but it performed well in simpler cases and showed potential.

⚠️ Query sensitivity is real.
Small changes in phrasing, like “Blind saha” vs “blind saha,” produced different outcomes. SearchDeen needs to improve how it handles casing, typos, and natural language.

📊 Ranking matters.
Even when both engines retrieved relevant Hadiths, Sunnah.com tended to show them at the top, while SearchDeen sometimes buried them lower in the list.

The Bigger Picture

This isn’t just a technical exercise. It’s about making Islamic knowledge more accessible — especially for new Muslims, students, teachers, and anyone seeking clarity from our sacred texts.

By holding ourselves to high standards and benchmarking against the best (like Sunnah.com), we aim to:

• Improve Hadith search across platforms
• Support accurate Islamic learning online
• Build trust with users looking for authentic guidance

What’s Next for SearchDeen?

We’re not stopping here. Our future plans include:

• Expanding our query dataset to include more languages and topics
• Integrating smarter AI tools for semantic search
• Supporting fuzzy matches for misspellings and typos
• Bringing in additional Hadith sources and multi-lingual search

SearchDeen is still growing, and we’re committed to making it the go-to search engine for Islamic knowledge.

Want to Learn More?

You can read the full technical report here:
📄 Comparative Evaluation of Hadith Search Engines (DOI)

If you’re passionate about improving Islamic tech or have feedback on Hadith search, we’d love to hear from you. Reach out to us at gtaf.org/contact.

Let’s build the future of Islamic learning — together.