HURISEARCH - specialized search engine for human rights

A different kind of search engine was relaunched recently - a specialized search engine that only indexes web sites containing information about human rights.

By Lars Våge

(July 2004) The search engine uses the search technology ESP from the Norwegian company FAST (you know, the people that developed Alltheweb).

The search engine is called HURISEARCH and has been created by HURIDOCS or Human Rights Information and Documentation Systems International.

HURIDOCS was founded in 1982 and is a global network of organizations working with documentation of human rights issues.

HURISEARCH has been online since 2003 but this new and improved version indexes the pages of 1300 web sites in 77 languages.

All of these web sites belong to non-governmental organizations (NGOs). One of the objectives is to make a search tool with fair and transparent systems for ranking and where no commercial interests are taken into account (no sponsored links).

One of the biggest problems for the dissemination of information about human rights has been that these web sites have disappeared among the results in the regular search engines.

This is because their web masters lack knowledge about search engine optimization and there is normally an insufficient number of inbound links.

These are the reasons for this specialized search engine supervised by people working with human rights.

In the press release John Lervik of FAST says that this is their way of helping to make the world a better place. They also get paid of course, in this case by the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Among the search functions are searching for word variations (probably some form of stemming), language specific searching, truncation, and the choice between static or dynamically generated descriptions.

The latter refers to KWIC or the keyword in context technique where the search words appear in the descriptions.

There are also several ways to find similar hits and it seems this is done by using the vector space model in different ways.

You can also limit the list of hits by different criteria such as document type, file size and related topics.

I recommend everyone interested in human rights to remember the name HURISEARCH. I also hope the new incarnation of this search engine will get at least some attention from the traditional news media.

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