Search Done Right

I grew up in Zambia, a developing country with limited resources. Yet I was fortunate enough to attend an international school before heading to the United States to receive a world-class education.

With the university’s access to a multitude of online data repositories, it was easy to find what I was looking for. The university subscribed to many information sources and made them available to students, whether they were preparing papers or presentations or just wanting to broaden their horizons. Sometimes those searches took a while because multiple data repositories had to be searched separately. But with advancements in search technologies over the last 10 years, we now have tools to help us find solutions and reach conclusions much quicker.

But what about people in less developed countries like Zambia? What kind of access do students, researchers and the general public have to rich and quality information?

Slow growth in technological infrastructure, lack of funds and weak education systems make progress difficult. This is where search technologies can help bridge the gap. Given access to rich content repositories and the right search tools, people in developing countries can find the necessary information to potentially lead to a breakthrough idea in research or to strengthen their own communities. Corporations pour billions into research and journal providers make money by providing access to content. All this primarily happens in developed countries with the money to invest in the latest and greatest technology. How can companies or organizations make access to some of this information freely available to less developed countries?

One such example is Health Sciences Online. According to its website, “HSO is the first website to deliver authoritative, comprehensive, free and ad-free health sciences knowledge.” The portal, powered by Vivisimo Velocity, enables users to search and browse any health sciences topic from more than 50,000 courses, references, guidelines and other learning resources. A few organizations like the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, NATO and the World Bank came together to “globally democratize health science knowledge.”

Another example is the Directory of Open Access Journals, which provides free access to more than 4,000 scholarly journals. Search enables one to easily find articles published in these journals. The metadata returned in the search results can be leveraged to further improve the user experience. But the real point here is that important scholarly work is freely available to anyone in the world.

Developed countries, capable companies and non-profit organizations should lead the way to help bridge the information gap and level the playing field by providing free access to high-quality information. I hope more steps are taken to leverage search technologies to provide opportunities for less developed countries to facilitate research that can lead to innovative ideas, help improve educational institutions and solve economic problems through access and the ability to search high quality information.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 6th, 2009 at 11:16 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.