Monday, January 29, 2007

Human Rights Search Engine Launched

A new search engine has been launched specialising in human rights sites. Called 'hurisearch', the engine has spidered over 2 million pages on specific human rights sites (mainly NGOs and academic institutions) and - from the quick spin I've given it - seems to deliver pretty good results. For example a search on'blasphemy' delivered mostly highly relevant academic and NGO papers on the subject, as well as fairly up-to-date reports of cases. Compare this with the Google result, which is very different (the specialised resources are found way below wikipedia (not to be knocked, but still), some seemingly random blogs and on-line dictionary results).
The inteligent user/researcher would use both, depending on the kind of results you are looking for.

In Firefox, you can set hurisearch as the default search engine for the location bar by typing about:config in the location bar, then enter 'keyword' as the filter and set the keyword.url value to "http://hurisearch.nidelven-it.no/search/search.jsp?query= " (without the quotation marks).

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