title: Best way to store large searchable text files
body: <p>I am developing an online Bible search program. The Bible is a pretty large book, taking up nearly 5MB of space in plain text. I am planning on implementing an API in the program as well allowing other websites to include their own Bible search widgets and programs without having to develop the search queries or storing Bibles on their own servers.</p>
  
  <p>With this in mind, I am going to expect that eventually I will have a moderate flow of queries passing through the program. Also, for those not familiar with the Bible, it has 2 methods of formatting the text. It can contain both red text and italics. I need a way to store the Scriptures along with the red letter and italics formatting but allowing the search queries to ignore the formatting.</p>
  
  <p>It also needs to be fast and as efficient (memory and cpu usage) as possible. Any storage format will be considered (MySQL, JSON or XML text files, etc) as long as the querying can be done ignoring the formatting. File size and count doesn't really matter, so splitting up the books or even chapters into separate files is fine by me.</p>
  
  <p>One more important thing to keep in mind though, is that I want to have some form of search method that can search across multiple verses. So a search for "<em>but have everlasting life for God sent not his Son</em>" would return <em>John 3:16,17</em>. Thanks for all ideas!</p>