STEUBENVILLE, Ohio -- Doug Lowry wants to make the health-care reform bills more accessible, if not more understandable.

The retired Franciscan University of Steubenville business professor has released a searchable copy of the Senate and House bills on a free Web site, www.searchthebill.com, so people can track down specific areas of interest in the combined 725,000-word documents.

But it's not a standard keyword search. Dr. Lowry, who did his first computer programming 45 years ago on an IBM 1440, has developed his own patented software that gives added weight to words that appear close together in the text, allowing for more precise and more relevant searches.

The result, he says, is a streamlined text search result without all the extraneous hits common with standard search engines.

"You say what you want and it will give you want you ask for," he said. "You're not digging through the garbage."

Local pediatrician Dr. Todd Wolynn said he heard about the site from another physician and used it to find any mention of immunizations and other areas he's interested in.

"It's a really nice tool," said Dr. Wolynn, who added that he'd had difficulty finding information on the bills through the Library of Congress search engine.

With searchthebill.com, he said: "I put in some phrases that I was interested in and I was able to pull up information pretty easily. This is kind of a cool engine."

Like many, Dr. Lowry was concerned last fall when the Senate health care reform bill passed with little opportunity to study, or even read, the massive document that could fundamentally change how health care is delivered in America.

By making the bills more easily searchable, Dr. Lowry believes that the additional transparency could boost sagging public confidence in Congress.

"Give people a piece of the action, and some of the more dubious behavior will disappear. We will stop sneaking things in at the last moment."

Dr. Lowry quickly added that he and his software were strictly nonpartisan.

"I'm not plugging either party at all. I'm trying to equip both sides," he said. "Let's get everything out in the open. Let's be more transparent."

Dr. Lowry's search engine works like this: If someone searches the bills for "public option" using quotation marks -- a common strategy with traditional search engines to avoid all the times those words appear separately -- they will get zero hits.

Without the quotation marks, Dr. Lowry's program recognizes the importance of those two words appearing close together and delivers 74 hits, with the phrasing "public health option" or "public health insurance option."

In short, his program turns text searches into a game of horseshoes, where close but inexact phrasing is good enough to find what you're looking for.

Not that finding what you want will always be relevant.

If you want to see the specific language of the controversial Medicaid exemption for Nebraska, a search of "Nebraska" and "Medicaid" brings it right up -- but still you may need a translator, or an attorney, to understand what it really means.

The section refers to "subclause (VII) of section 1902(a)(10)(A)(i)" to say that newly eligible individuals in Nebraska "shall be determined as provided for under subsection (y)(1)(A) (notwithstanding the period provided for in such paragraph)."

Dr. Lowry acknowledged that "my system works better when people are trying to reveal, rather than hide."

There's another intriguing component to Dr. Lowry's work, something he calls "compression indexing," which frees up valuable bytes. His program does this by recording all the words and images of a document into a database but retaining just one copy of each, while also creating a digital map of where each word should be.

The implication, Dr. Lowry says, is that his software could more than double the book capacity of the current top-selling electronic book readers. Or, as his colleague John C. Scott, put it, "It would allow you to put a [digital] Carnegie Library in every city," where "millions of books can be searched for their content."

Dr. Lowry, who earned his doctorate from the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1969, has been developing search engines since 1984.

So far, his search engine is limited to collections of up to 3.2 million words, but he hopes some day that it will have the capacity to search the entire Internet.

He primarily has used it to index books no longer protected by copyright laws, including the Bible. In 1990, he traveled to the Vatican to present Pope John Paul II with four computerized copies of the Bible, two in English and two in French.

He also has indexed 14,000 books, including works by Shakespeare, Charles Dickens and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, which he said will be available for download and search through a link on his Web site, www.marpx.com, this weekend.

No registration is required to use the search engine, and Dr. Lowry said the program does not collect information about who makes searches, or what they search for.

His goal, he said, is simply "to delight people with better searches. I've watched the frustration of people searching through garbage. They deserve something better and more meaningful. Why not give people the good stuff to start with?"

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