Noesis Beta

Noesis: Philosophical Research Online, the limited area search engine that was available from 1998 to 2003, is now back online, courtesy of a new experimental, search engine co-op offered by Google. The concept has been revised a bit (see the project’s “About” page), but the project remains dedicated to professional philosophy online. With Noesis, users can search the body of catalogued webpages coming from professional associations, university and college departments, faculty websites, online journals and reference works. These can all be searched simultaneously, or users can filter their searches to only one of the domains just mentioned.

One feature of Noesis’s cataloguing strategy is that “the shape and texture of Noesis's search space is determined organically by credentialed scholars whose actions directly determine content” (See the “About” page). Once a faculty website has been indexed, for instance, any changes to that site will automatically be reflected in the content accessible through Noesis, provided that Google’s crawlers are able to find and index those changes.

Because the Google Co-op is still being developed and tested, Noesis is currently available as a beta release until Google arrives at a finished product. To learn more about the project, visit the website.