Which organizations should lead in articulating and promulgating effective global AIDS policy? To my eye the leaders should be UNAIDS, WHO, the World Bank, CDC and the Gates Foundation. How effective are these groups in this policy role? They certainly could be doing much better. For example, recently I searched Google on "Global AIDS Policy". None of these groups came up in search results -- or more precisely, they came up very low:

UNAIDS: #45
CDC: #71
WHO: #191
World Bank: #195
Gates: (not in top 200)

As a rule of thumb, you want to be in the first 20 search results (first screen) on Google or you are essentially "invisible". The groups faring well on Google are mostly smaller NGOs that pay attention to Web and communications issues.

UNAIDS should be the highest profile AIDS policy organization in the World (and in some ways they are as described in a recent IAEN study). I however tried to see if I could find UNAIDS with any search string on Google. I tried:

AIDS policy
AIDS ARV
AIDS orphans
AIDS blood supply
AIDS condoms
AIDS prison
AIDS vaccine

In no case did UNAIDS appear in the top 20 search results. That's disappointing. I haven't looked more closely to see what they are doing wrong with their keywords and search engine optimization -- but apparently neither have they. I don't mean to overstate the importance of Google, but I do think it serves as a reasonable test for an organization's attention to information dissemination, and the most important policy organizations should be doing much better than they are.