Open Access News

Tony Beavers has launched the beta of Noesis 4.0, a search engine for OA philosophy.  From the announcement:

Noesis is a limited area search engine for open access, academic philosophy online. Built with Google's new Co-op program, Noesis allows users to search the combined webspace of our set of indexed professional associations, philosophy departments, faculty websites, online journals and reference works. Each area can also be searched independently. For more information, see [the "about" page].

At present, the dataset is small, but search return sets are nonetheless informative. Please help this initiative by submitting additional links via the "submit" page on the website.

From the "about" page:

The first version of Noesis: Philosophical Research On-line appeared on the Internet in 1998. It was born out of insights acquired while implementing two earlier search engines, Argos: Limited Area Search of the Ancient and Medieval Internet (1996) and Hippias: Limited Area Search of Philosophy on the Internet (1997). These projects were based on the notion that if users could search a carefully selected sub-section of the Internet, search engines could implement a kind of peer review, separating the wheat from the chaff and harnessing the power of the Internet for scholarly purposes. Both Argos and Hippias limited their scope by searching a set of "associate sites" and everything to which they linked, in effect passing editorial control over their search spaces to the editors of the various associate sites. Their decisions directly determined content....

The current version of Noesis runs on the backbone of Google through an interface provided as part of the Google Co-op. In addition to allowing designers to specify individual documents for inclusion in a particular search engine, the interface also allows them to include whole websites in a single pass and to label them for subset searching. This feature results in greater flexibility for shaping a search space, while inviting a more regional approach to the problems mentioned above....

By indexing regions, in effect, directories and subdirectories, rather than their contents, Noesis passes editorial control of its search space over to the individuals who, in managing their own web resources, add to, edit, and delete from the content searchable by Noesis....The result is that the shape and texture of Noesis's search space is determined organically by credentialed scholars whose actions directly determine content....

Comment.  I'm proud to disclose that I'm an editorial consultant for Noesis 4.0, was co-editor of previous versions of Noesis, and was general editor of Hippias (one of Noesis' ancestor projects).  Noesis 4.0 is a simple and powerful way to approach the problem of discipline-limited search (hence, the problems of information overload and false positives) and one of the most systematic scholarly adaptations of Google Custom Search.  I can praise Noesis openly because I've already divulged my lack of objectivity and because the lion's share of the credit goes to Tony Beavers, not to me.  But the point of my disclosure is that you shouldn't take my word for it.  Check it out for yourself.