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Hippias: Your First Resort for Internet Research in Philosophy

© Frederic Giacobazzi

A recent widely reported estimate placed the number of publicly-accessible pages on the World-Wide Web at more than 400 million, the surging product of the phenomenal and accelerating wave of Internet growth which marks our turn-of-the-century era. The vast number of existing Web pages and the torrent of those coming on-line daily continue to tax all efforts to provide users with a complete and reliable means of locating information. For students seeking credible information about philosophy, the Internet offers a daunting challenge - an amalgamation of established first-rate sites with sound information and well-maintained links to other sites, a growing trickle of new sites of solid quality, all set against a constant background noise of the ephemeral and inconsequential. The Net's a high chaff-to-wheat ratio continues both to charm and frustrate.

But then came Hippias.

Hippias: Limited Area Search of Philosophy on the Internet has been making good on a promise to impose some peer-reviewed order on the cyber-spatial chaos. Established in 1997, the Hippias search engine aims to create "an academically viable" research tool for students, teachers and scholars of philosophy. It provides users with a means of accessing philosophy-related Web resources which are quality-controlled by "a system of hyperlinked Internet sites which are managed by qualified professionals" who serve as associate editors of the Hippias project. Hippias is, in effect, a peer-reviewed search engine which can lower the chaff-to-wheat ratio to very manageable proportions.

To illustrate what Hippias can do for the user searching the Web for philosophy-related information, the site's overview page provides the following illustration:

At the time of this writing, a search for "Plato" on the internet search engine Lycos returned 6,044 responses. InfoSeek returned 25,543, and Alta Vista 44,430. Intermixed with returns that may be of interest to philosophers were a wide variety of other responses, including popular pieces on the lost city of Atlantis, software packages for education and home automation, information on towns that go by the name of "Plato" and so on. Add to this broad range of responses the fact that these search engines return ten entries per page, making it necessary to examine thousands of pages of replies, many of which are irrelevant to a scholarly search of "Plato," and the result is a process that is frustrating and inefficient.

Such frustrating results, say Hippias' editors, are the product of the structural bias built into the major Internet search engines, which prefer the broad Net search to the narrow one. Hippias, on the other hand, seeks to provide a smaller, specialized group of users (in this case, those seeking philosophy information) with a narrow search of higher quality. Hippias is driven by the LASE search engine developed by Anthony F. Beavers and Hiten Sonpal at the University of Evansville. Hippias is the second product of LASE technology. Some readers may be familiar with the first, the Argos Project, a limited area search engine dedicated to ancient and medieval Internet resources.

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