Noesis is a searchable index of open access philosophical research on the internet. The site was created by Anthony Beavers and Peter Suber and has been on the internet in various forms since 1998. In addition to Beavers and Suber, who serve as editor and editorial consultant respectively, the current version also includes an associate editor and a twelve member advisory board. All editors and board members are affiliated with academic philosophy departments. No mention is made of the responsibilities of the advisory board, but it is assumed that members add and maintain the links included in the site.
The homepage of the site includes five buttons to pages of categorized links, a search field, and a number of hyperlinked Sample Searches. The five buttons provide access to links of Associations, Academic Departments, Faculty Webspace, Online Journals, and Reference Works. Noesis also makes use of two other categories not listed on the homepage: Author Archives, which is a subset of Faculty Webspace; and Scholarship, which is a combination of Author Archives, Online Journals and Reference Works, with paper archives from Associations and Departments. All of the categories are searchable through an interface provided as part of the Google Co‐op. This freely available Google platform allows the site's creators to specify both individual documents and entire web sites for inclusion in the search engine's results.
The site is browsed by clicking on any one of the five categorized buttons provided on the homepage. Doing so provides the user with a series of alphabetized links within the category chosen. For instance, the Associations page provides links to 81 philosophy related professional associations, conferences and societies; the Departments page includes 102 links to academic philosophy departments at universities and colleges throughout the world; Faculty Webspace provides links to faculty homepages, which, depending on the person chosen, could include links to lecture notes and online papers; the Online Journals page provides links to 69 open‐access philosophy related journals and paper archives; while the Reference Works page provides links to the Stanford and internet encyclopedias of philosophy, as well as the Dictionary of the Philosophy of Mind.
The site is searched by entering keywords in the search field provided on the homepage. An initial search will search all of the indexed web sites at once and present the results in a standard Google relevancy ranked results list. After completing a search, users can limit the results by selecting one of the categories listed at the bottom of the results set. For example, after conducting a search on the term “Aristotle” the user may then limit the results to information provided in the Associations, Departments, Faculty, Reference, Scholarship, Journals, or Archives categories. The search engine supports Boolean operators as well as phrase searching. Searched keywords and phrases are highlighted in bold text in the results list.
The site is well‐organized and easy to use. The homepage is uncluttered, without advertisements or tie‐ins to unneeded services. Though the site includes a relatively small number of links, documents retrieved are of high quality. This is because included resources are limited to only those written by credentialed academic philosophers. By limiting the results in this way the site is able to weed out poor quality resources, as well as those irrelevant to the information sought (e.g., Plato the philosopher, as opposed to Plato the city in Minnesota). A few broken links were found, but this is to be expected of a site of manually maintained links. Information regarding the history and content of the site is available through About and Scope pages respectively. A Help page provides an email address for contacting the editor, while a Submit page allows users to recommend links for inclusion. Though Noesis promotes itself as a site for and by academic philosophers, the resource is highly recommended for students and anyone else interested in this subject area.
