HURIDOCS stands for Human Rights Information and Documentation Systems, International. Established in 1982, it is a global network of organisations concerned with human rights. HURIDOCS itself does not collect information; rather, it functions as a decentralised network in which organisations can handle and exchange information according to their own requirements.
HURIDOCS facilitates human rights documentation work by:
HURIDOCS is an open-ended network where organisations can participate in various ways: Task Forces, training courses etc. HURIDOCS does not have a formal membership structure, but it has contacts with organisations in more than 150 countries. The main focus of HURIDOCS is to strengthen the information handling capacities of organisations in developing countries.
HuriSearch, developed by Huridocs, is a specialised human rights search engine which provides one-stop access to the complete contents of Websites of human rights organisations world-wide. End September 2007, HuriSearch searched the content of over 3,250 sites, with a total of more than 3.8 million pages.
The source of information is crucially important in human rights work. HuriSearch makes it possible to focus searches on information published in a particular country, by a particular type of organisation, by a specific organisation, or in a specific language.
HuriSearch also analyses search results; for each document crawled, relevant keywords out of a list of over 300 terms relevant to human rights are identified.
The HuriSearch website and the search interface are available in eight languages: English, French, Spanish, German, Russian, Arabic Chinese and Korean. HuriSearch allows searching information in 77 languages.
HuriSearch was launched in 2003, and major upgrades became available during the second half of 2006. The new version of HuriSearch was officially launched on 1 December 2006. It received considerable coverage in the electronic media.<http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6198244.stm> Since the launch, the site had ca. 180 unique visitors per day.
HuriSearch is developed by HURIDOCS in collaboration with FAST, a search technology company. In 2009, HuriSearch was re-developed as an Open Search search engine, in collaboration with www.wiizio.com
The goal of HuriSearch is to provide users of human rights information with a reliable, relevant, multi-lingual, continuously accessible and user-friendly access to the millions of pages published on the Web.