"What is there which is well known and not great and is yet 

as susceptible of definition as any larger thing? Shall I say an angler?" 

(Plato, Sophist, 218e)

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 first version of Noesis added greater control over document classification and allowed users to search organized subsets of its central database. Here, links were manually catalogued by individuals who did a preliminary scan for credentialed authorship. From this broader base, a board of editors arranged independently-searchable topic trees, simultaneously vetting resources while determining the project's topical shape. Quality was controlled by considering links one at a time or by indexing resources en masse if they were part of a peer-reviewed initiative. Search return sets were sharp, on topic and all academic, a decided improvement in quality control and organization over earlier models, but, for that, the labor was intensive.

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.

Noesis's ultimate target is academic scholarship in philosophy that is freely available online. The design task, comprehended regionally, is to determine where in cyberspace one is likely to find it, and search there, hoping  to cast a net broadly enough to catch what we are looking for, while minimalizing the prospects of a bad catch, to fish in the richest waters. One sensible strategy to do this is to map those areas of the Internet where professionals in philosophy are overwhelmingly likely to appear, principally, their home bases on the web, the academic departments where they teach, the organizations and conferences they populate, and the online versions of traditional forums through which they publish (e.g., journals, reference works, etc.)

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. Because the strategy outlined in the previous paragraph follows institutional boundaries, these individuals are overwhelmingly professional philosophers. The result is that the shape and texture of Noesis's search space is determined organically by credentialed scholars whose actions directly determine content.

At these horizons, we have intentionally cast the net widely, with some fortunate consequences and some additional work to do. A preliminary search in Noesis will turn up not only scholarly articles, but also lecture notes, course schedules, conference announcements, and an array of miscellaneous information coming from the profession. Though not quite the target, resources in return sets are, often, of likely interest to our users. From this larger set, however,  we can locate and catalogue regions in the search space dedicated to scholarly content and make them collectively searchable.

For this purpose, Noesis uses two labels: author archives and scholarship. "Author archives" are directories set aside by authors for the purpose of collecting and disseminating their work. The space of "scholarship" includes author directories, online journals, reference works, and article archives coming from professional associations and philosophy departments. As Noesis develops, filtering content to these regions will effectively reduce search return sets to our target, academic scholarship in philosophy.

A side effect of this cataloging strategy, which is useful enough to be called a feature, is that users can filter searches to the various regions that this project maps. Users can, for instance, search at once the collective webspace of all indexed philosophy departments, or search faculty webspace in a single pass. Searches can also be filtered to content coming only from professional organizations, online journals or reference works. We hope that the power of regional searching will here prove useful for scholarly purposes, not only as a tool for finding academic scholarship, but also as a medium for exploring the terrain of professional philosophy more broadly.

For more on the history of this project and the open access movement in general, see our reference page.