Solving the problems of finding law on the web:  World Law and DIAL The problem - Internet legal research is difficult

Two types of tools -  Catalogs and search engines

• Catalogs - where individual Web sites are classified by hand (also called 'intellectual’ indexes)
• Search engines -  the combination of a 'Web robot'  and the data it gathers, and the text retrieval software used to search that data

Catalogs alone are insufficient

Good catalogs (intellectual indexes) for law are hard to find

Many are US-oriented with only a slight international gloss

Catalogs are hard to maintain - and expensive

At best they can identify significant sites but not index their content

General purpose search engines alone are insufficient

They are not comprehensive - see Lawrence and  Giles 1999

- expansion to 800M web pages is core problem
- best coverage is 16% (Northern Light)
- coverage declined from 33% in 1997 to 16% in 1999

Even meta-search engines could give 42% at best

Many other reasons why they are not comprehensive

Diminishing economic returns in increasing coverage?

General search engines  are often out of date

General search engines contain too much ‘noise’

General search engines are biased in favour of 'popular' pages

General search engines do not provide unbiased world-wide coverage

Some are selling priority places in their relevance ranking

An unsatisfactory result -  new solutions are needed