EA researchers and people in similar roles such as grantmakers and policy analysts face a difficult search challenge. They are often trying to find high-quality resources that synthesise expert consensus in fields that are unfamiliar to them. Google often returns results that are too low-quality and popularly-oriented, but google scholar returns results that are too specific or which are only tangentally related to EA/policy/grantmaker interests. An improved search engine would return quality synthesis resources such as books, lectures, podcast episodes, expert blog posts, etc. A simple way to implement this would just be a custom search engine that searches a curated list of websites such as think tanks, blogs, etc.
Additional notes:
APO is a good example of the kind of thing that is useful—it is a searchable collection of policy documents mostly from Australia and New Zealand.
EA-oriented research search engines
Effective altruism
EA researchers and people in similar roles such as grantmakers and policy analysts face a difficult search challenge. They are often trying to find high-quality resources that synthesise expert consensus in fields that are unfamiliar to them. Google often returns results that are too low-quality and popularly-oriented, but google scholar returns results that are too specific or which are only tangentally related to EA/policy/grantmaker interests. An improved search engine would return quality synthesis resources such as books, lectures, podcast episodes, expert blog posts, etc. A simple way to implement this would just be a custom search engine that searches a curated list of websites such as think tanks, blogs, etc.
Additional notes:
APO is a good example of the kind of thing that is useful—it is a searchable collection of policy documents mostly from Australia and New Zealand.
Possibly https://elicit.org/ is already going to be an overall solution for this.