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9. Full text remote search for law - DIAL Search


DIAL Search is the only implementation as yet of the targeted web spider. About 350 MB of targeted sites have been indexed, providing searches over about 50,000 pages. Targeting has been limited, due to the nature of project DIAL, to legislation and legislation-related sites, and to indexes of law on the web.

Interface and search language

The DIAL Search component uses the SINO search engine to search over all of the world-wide legislation which is able to be indexed by the targeted web spider. From the DIAL Search interface shown below, searches may be entered using boolean and proximity operators and truncation.

The DIAL Search interface, with `Boolean (Ranked Results)' selected

Two types of search/display options are provided: At a later stage of development, when we are able to provide useful database and library headings within DIAL Search, more search and display options will be provided, to allow searches to be limited by the type of library into which the material has been categorised (`Legislation', `Law reform', `Case law' etc), or limited by the domain of the desired country, and for search results to be displayed grouped by database of origin rather than by relevance ranking (as is currently available on AustLII).


DIAL Search - Display of search results

DIAL Search - Display of search results

Results are displayed as shown below. Items are ranked in order of likely relevance. The user is give the option to repeat the search over a number of other systems.

Further work on the display of results may result in the name of the database from which each entry comes being displayed with it, so it is easier to recognise which counties particular legislative items are from.

Finding law about a country

One particularly effective use of DIAL Search is to use it to find starting points for research concerning the laws of a named country. Because the relevance ranking tends to give short documents and documents that use a search term in a title, many of the internet law indexes that have a separate page for that country will appear near the top of the list, so the user can they quickly review existing intellectual law indexes for that country. Selecting `Repeat this search over DIAL links' will find the entries concerning the country in AustLII's index.



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