Search Engines

Search engines are powerful resources for doing legal research, but each has a unique system of processing searches and they all index a different subset of the Internet. Moreover, they can be somewhat out of date. For these reasons, you should not limit yourself to using a single search engine.
A directory is a database in which information is organized by subject. These directories are usually compiled and annotated by aneditorial staff. Some directories have editorial content and some are subject specific. One drawback to using directories is that each directory creates its own subject headings, and there is no consistency between directories. As a result, users may have to guess at a logical point of entry into the directory. Directory users follow links to their particular area of interest. Some directories include a search engine of their own database.

Law Related Search Engines

The FindLaw index is quite extensive, with links to many legal sources, including codes, case law, legal associations, specialty area materials, law reviews, law schools and law firms. Visitors can search FindLaw itself, as well as the full text of law reviews online. FindLaw also offers free updates of law review and law journal article abstracts by way of e-mail directly to you.

CataLaw

Actually a catalog of catalogs of law on the Internet, CataLaw attempts to speed research by arranging hundreds of legal and government indexes into a single, simple, intuitive metaindex.

Internet Legal Resource Guide

A categorized index of more than 4000 select web sites in 238 nations, islands, and territories, as well as thousands of locally stored web pages, legal forms, and downloadable files, this site was established in 1995 to serve as a comprehensive resource of the information available on the Internet concerning law and the legal profession, with an emphasis on the United States of America.

Law Related Search Engines by Material Type

Legislative Documents

Global Legal Information Network (GLIN)

A database consisting of laws, regulations, and other legal sources of the governments of the member nations. The database includes the full texts of the documents in the official language of the country of origin, summaries or abstracts in English and a thesauri in English and in as many official languages as are represented in the database. The summaries or abstracts are linked electronically to the corresponding full texts

Law Journals

University Law Review Project

Set-up by FindLaw and the Coalition of Online Journals with help from Verity, the Australasian Legal Information Institute, the Legal Information Institute at Cornell, Stanford University and JURIST - The Law Professors' Network, this site allows you to conduct a full-text search of those law journals which maintain a presence on the Internet. In addition, the site features a index of law journals by topic and law school affiliation.

General Search Engines

Academic Info

Offers a rich collection of educational resources web pages, quality databases, and links to full-text resources and organizations selected primarily for academic research at undergraduate or graduate levels.

All the Web

Launched in 1999, this site contains over 340 million pages and web databases. Provides large multimedia, and continues to expand in terms of volume of pages and freshness of data spidered. Advanced search allows the addition of terms to refine search results, and upper and lower case are recognized as different characters. Also conducts full page archiving, and stores all contents of pages into its database. Worth considering for fast and accurate searches!

AltaVista

AltaVista is one of the largest scale search engines that indexes an entire website. It has a large index of over 350 million pages, six million articles from 50,000 Usenet newsgroups pages, and a wide range of searches including Power, Advanced and Raging search. Altavista ranks sites and p,rovides a rating for hits based on the location of the search terms in a document and the proximity of search terms to one another. Also offers news search, shopping search and multimedia search. When searching for relatively obscure topics, select the advanced search and carefully choose search terms, using Boolean operators such as 'and' and 'or'. Lastly, search results may be displayed in standard, compact or detailed form. Altavista supports various meta tags, with focus on the keywords, as well as full page indexing which includes image tags, image maps, and frames. In addition, upper and lower case are recognized differently. AltaVista is available in Europe as AltaVista Europe, and it indexes pages within fourteen different languages as well as provides a translation service.

Ask Jeeves!

Although the content is not specifically designed for legal research, this site is well worth a visit. Ask questions in plain english, and Ask Jeeves will not only try hard to answer you in plain english, but will produce more consistently useful and rationally related results than most search engines. Originally launched in April 1997, Ask Jeeves is more of a directory than a search engine that emphasizes ease of use and relevance in its results. Combines natural language questions, and uses its database of knowledge bases to best determine a suitable and targeted answer (for instance "What was the date the Declaration of Independence was signed"). In early 2000, Ask Jeeves acquired Direct Hit, and has implemented Direct Hit's technology into its search results. Ask Jeeves results lead to links, usually connected to one particular site. If it cannot find an answer, it then leads to results from several different search engines. After results are displayed, the engine shows the top results from other search engines which are partners to Direct Hit.

Daypop

This current awareness search engine is dedicated to all the latest news and current events on the web. Crawls newspapers, online magazines and weblogs, and indexes over 5800 of the best news sites and weblogs every day.

Excite

Excite, a popular search engine, offers a crawler-based web page index (over 50 million websites) which includes several free features such as news, stocks, horoscopes, sports, and weather. Also includes a database of over 60,000 reviewed sites. The index provides access to results from LookSmart, and offers searches by concept, looking for words specified in the search as well as for related subjects. Provides search results by matching keyword synonyms. For instance, a search for 'elderly people' will automatically look for related terms 'senior citizens'. Excite indexes all visible text, but does not support image tags, image maps or frames. Basic and advanced 'precision' searches are available. Results are sorted by relevance expressed as a percentage and if all the search terms are found, the search engine would rate relevance at 100%. Overall, a quite useful search engine.

Google

Google, a top choice search engine, offers the largest collection of web pages of any crawler-based search engine. In ranking pages, Google uses link analysis feature primarily in identifying relevant and useful sites in the process of conducting general searches. Contains subject directories and provides search results to a host of partners, including Yahoo and Netscape. Provides powerful and accurate results based on all the keywords entered. Google keeps a local cache copy of many websites indexed in their database to allow for faster access of websites in case the destination server is temporarily inaccessible. Recently, Google has launched image search by keyword in beta release to deliver a quick and easy search for image files. Google Canada is restricted to searches on Canadian pages and contents.

Hieros Gamos

Claiming to provide access to every organization, association, law school, firm, vendor, consultant, etc. directly or indirectly involved with the legal profession, Heiros Gamos provides over 200 practice area compilations, over 15,000 original pages, over 30,000 external links and over 9,000 pre-programmed searches.

Infoseek (go.com)

Infoseek, originally launched in 1995, has become a popular search engine since its partnership with Disney to form "Go Network". Contains over two hundred million pages indexes web sites as well as images, newsgroups, FAQs, news, company profiles, phone numbers, e-mail addresses, etc. Provides much more relevant results, with the most pertinent results appearing on the first page. Unique features include user-friendliness, quality of relevant search results, and consideration of variations and synonyms of keywords in searching. For instance, if the keyword search is 'watch', Infoseek will also look up sites containing the words 'watches', 'clock', etc. Upper and lower case are recognized differently. Additional features include its News Center which can retrieve recent news stories as well as its comprehensive subject directory of sites.

LookSmart

Looksmart, one of the most commercialized engines and directory services since its inception in 1995, ranks sites and provides results to MSN Search, Excite, and various other partners. Looksmart is powered by a large number of editors, and powers several other search engines, namely, MSN Search, Altavista, Excite and Dogpile. Offers keyword match to Real Names, a commercial keyword system where buyers reserve keywords associated with their website or organization. Overall, a useful search engine!

Teoma

Launched in Spring 2001, this engine returns authoritative sites relevant to a search. Top results are grouped based on a topic, and pages containing directories are linked to related subjects. As a metasite, Teoma combines both directory and crawler techniques for searches. No Boolean searching is available, although Teoma defaults to an 'AND' between search terms and supports the use of - for 'Not'. Provides a link to "Related Topic & Expert Links" which include links to external resources and pages created by subject experts.

Wisenut

Like Google, the engine presents a set of automatically-generated topic groupings at the top of the results page which appear to be generated from word counts within the results pages. Wisenut claims to have indexed over 1.5 billion pages with the help of its spider named ZyBorg. Contains multiple pages from a single site in its index, and listing offers a link (for example "See 51 More Pages From This Site!"). Like Google, Wisenut offers query syntax (phrase matching, "+" and "-", no Booleans), and uses a relevancy ranking system for its searches. Also checks the number of links to the pages and their source. A great search engine!

WWW Virual Library

Provides a catalogue of all the virtual library divisions worldwide. Consists of subject guides annoatated and evaluated, and allows browsing by subject category or alphabetically. If relevant information is not available, try browsing the list of VLs for a topic or title relevant to search. For instance, if nothing useful comes up in the search for baseball statistics, try browsing the "S" section to find the Sports. The VL pages are recognized as being amongst the highest quality guides on the web.

Meta Search Engines

Beaucoup

Beaucoup, one of the oldest specialized search engine guides, lists over 2500 specialized search engines, directories and indices, divided into 13 subject categories and over 40 subcategories. Although it focuses on popular subjects or definitions, it covers many academic and general engines in "Sciences and Technology", and "Politics and Government" categories. Provides additional search engines for several topics. Performs simultaneous searching of search engines categories. Quite useful for conducting research on diverse aspects of a subject!

Dogpile

Dogpile, owned by Go2Net and currently one of the established meta search engines, queries top dozen search engines, including Altavista, Looksmart, Lycos, GoTo, Direct Hit, Google, Infoseek, (Go Network) and Yahoo. The search results list the search engine, followed by up to first ten results, and then followed by the next search engine and its first ten results. If there are more than ten, the "Next set of results" link will then lead to the individual search engine itself listing the next set of results. Allows for customized searchs of databases, directories and specialty search sites. Also searches WWW Usenet, and News search engines.

Search Engines Colossus

This international directory of search engines offers links to search engines from 180 countries around the world. Exhaustive searches are available, using choice of language and favourite search engines. Allows sorting of search engines by country or category.

Ixquick

IXQUICK, a fast and comprehensive meta search engine, is best suited for finding the most relevant listings. Ranks findings by relevance, and supports regular searches, natural language searches, and advanced boolean searches. Unique features include its ability to identify engines that can handle different types of searches. Offers simultaneous searches of 14 major search engines, including AltaVista, Fast Search, and Euoroseek.

Metacrawler

Originally launched in 1995 and now owned by Go2Net, Metacrawler contains Open Directory and subject directories. Searches over 15 multiple sites simultaneously including Excite, AltaVista, Direct Hit, Google, Infoseek, LookSmart, Lycos, Thunderstone, Yahoo, About.Com, and newsgroups. Power search feature is available, and Metaspy shows most recent searches by others. Metacrawler has won various awards, and voted by PC Magazine as the best search engine.

Profusion

Profusion, owned by Intelliseek, searches About, AltaVista, Excite, LookSmart, Yahoo, Encyclopedia Britannica, Direct Hit, GoTo, and Webcrawler. Provides results from several major search engines as well as "invisible web" resources. Findings are aggregated into one ranked list that can be sorted alphabetically by relevancy, either by site title or by source. "Check Links" feature automatically checks the links of listings and only deliver those that are currently active.

Created at the Carnegie Mellon University, this engine displays and organizes search results with "document clustering" i.e. automatic organization of documents into meaningful groups (titles, URLs, and short descriptions) as well as into hierarchical categories. Unlike other search engines, Vivisimo groups related documents and pages within a certain site as well as results found by other search engines and databases. Provides a solid overview of a topic, and attempts to find precise answers within seconds. "Preview" feature creates a small window within the search list that allows for viewing the page before actually visiting it. A recommended meta search engine!

Internet Directories

AOL Search

America Online allows searches across the web and AOL's own content from one place. Listings for categories and web sites come from the Open Directory Project. AOL Netfind uses similar indexing and spidering techniques as the Open Directory Project (for web site matches) and the same techniques as Hotbot (for web page matches.

HotBot

Originally launched in 1996 by Wired Digital, Hot Bot is now part of the Lycos Network. Hotbot is powered on the Inktomi for search capabilities and the Open Directory Project for its directory information. In most cases, first page results come from the Direct Hit service, and then secondary results come from the Inktomi search engine. Contains unique features, including a flexible and powerful advanced search function as well as the capability of analysing 10 million documents a day. With over 110 million web pages, the engine has improved browsing and searching capabilities, and supports base word search. For instance, the engine automatically searches for 'eaten', 'eating', 'eater', etc. if one enters 'eat'. HotBot has the largest archives of any search engine. Results are fast and accurate, and the quality and efficiency of findings make this engine a favourite among researchers.

Launced in October 1999 and backed by CBS Television Network, Iwon has become a significant portal, mostly due to its cash giveaways for using the web services. Provides a directory of web sites generated automatically by Inktomi. Iwon uses latest technologies such as Looksmart Category Matches, Inktomi Powered Results, Direct Hit Results, and .com News Services. The engine spiders all links found on a website, and indexes them into their database.

Initially started in 1994 as a University project, Lycos is now a large scale search engine. Offers directory-based listings, and provides services beyond searching the web. Listings come from the Open Directory Project, and secondary results come from the FAST Search engine. Also contains a directory of the top 5% most visited sites on the web which are reviewed by the Lycos' editorial staff and organized by subject. Lycos currently analyses over 100 million URLs, the individual Internet addresses, and stores 34 million in its search index. Unlike other engines, indexing of information also includes references to individual files such as images, audio and video documents. Provides a catalogue of sites listed by subjects as well as a list of sites considered useful and assessed on the merit of their contents. Lycos assigns rating number to each of the hits which refer to relevancy of the keyword found.

Microsoft's MSN Search service is a LookSmart-powered directory of web sites, with secondary results coming from Inktomi. Listings from RealNames, Direct Hit and AltaVista are also provided. Offers a unique feature for Internet Explorer 5 users to save past searches.

Netscape Search results come primarily from the Open Directory Project and Netscape's own 'smart browsing' database which lists 'official' web sites. Secondary results come from Google.

The Open Directory Project (ODP), or DMOZ, originally developed in 1998, uses thousands of volunteered editors to power the index. Originally named "NewHoo", Netscape acquired the operation in November 1998, and re-named it Netscape Open Directory Project. The ODP, one of the largest databases for multiple search engines, catalogues the entire web. The multiple search engines that use Open Directory information include Lycos, Hotbot, Altavista, Google, AOL, and others.

Originally launched in 1994, Yahoo is a major web site directory. As one of the most popular website, the engine provides a very comprehensive and one of the largest subject organized directories. Offers collections of resources for a topic directory, organized into subject headings and sub-headings. Lists well over one million sites, and provides fresh quality websites on a continuous basis. Yahoo is not a search engine but a directory. Unlike other search engines, it classifies sites which are divided into categories in a tree-like structure i.e. users can easily find sites by category, thus eliminating the ones outside their specific field of interest. Yahoo supplements its results with those from Google (starting July 2000 when Google took over from Inktomi). Yahoo Canada is aimed at Canadian resources. Rated as one of the best search engines for searching subject categories!

Designed, updated and maintained by Susan Barker, Electronic Information Coordinator.

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All contents copyright Bora Laskin Law Library, 2004