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AIDS Search Engine Wanted: What to Do Now?

By John S James

Summary: Simply adding 'HIV' to your search works pretty well to make any online search AIDS-related.

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Have you ever wanted to do a Google, etc. online search but only see AIDS-related pages? There isn't such a search engine, but here is a simple approximation: just add HIV as one of your search terms (for example, search for 'funding HIV' without the quotation marks). We have never noticed a Web page with 'HIV' on it that was not AIDS-related (except when we went looking for them -- there are typos where somebody meant to write "bee hive").

How many English-language AIDS-related sites will you miss by limiting your search in this way? We don't know, but 'HIV' seems to get most, yet miss a substantial minority. (Denialist sites are not missed, since they use the word 'HIV' in claiming it does not cause AIDS.) You can find many sites that are missed by searching for words like 'ritonavir' that are not used much outside of an AIDS-related context. These searches indicate that 'HIV' finds most of the pages you want, but far from all. These words may not be representative, but we have not found a way to get better information.

Somebody could do a public service by providing a search of maybe several thousand relevant Web pages, selected by some kind of rating or voting system -- either by the public, by an expert panel, or (best) by both. Such a site could collect current copies of all the designated pages at least once a day and then search the text locally, in order to return current results quickly, without doing thousands of Web accesses for each search. The pages will already be ranked by whatever rating system selected them in the first place, so the most highly ranked pages can be returned first. And just the process of selecting the sites would generate important public conversation and education.

Such a search site would give people an easy way to get good general AIDS information quickly. But it could not be close to complete. A Google search for HIV finds over 70,000,000 pages, not just a few thousand. So adding 'HIV' to a regular online search will still be a useful tool.

For example, a Google search for NASA finds about 100 million Web pages. Add HIV to the search, and about two million are returned -- most of them relevant, at least near the beginning of the list. About 98% of the pages have been omitted, providing the focus you want.

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