World Law / DIAL - User Guide & Guided Tour - 3. Searching using World Law

There is a search form on each page of World Law, which allows you to search by entering search terms in a window like the one below, and clicking on the 'Search' key.

Searches are always over two sets of information:

The full text of pages of web sites listed in the catalog. The search return results as 'Web pages found' if your search matches words found on any pages of web sites that World Law's web spider has been able to download and make searchable. At present (September 2000) this includes over 15 gigabytes of text from law web sites (only) from around the world.
The text of pages of the World Law catalog itself. The search returns results as 'Categories in this Index' if your search matches words found on pages (categories) in the catalog. There are over a thousand pages (categories) in the catalog.

What you can't search: There are many types of sites on the Internet that a web spider cannot access. These include commercial sites protected by passwords; certain file formats such as PDF; dynamically created pages; and sites that tell web spiders or robots that they may not enter ('robot exclusions'). For this reason, search engines cannot help you find all types of resources on the web - you need to use catalogs to find the other types of resources.

For further reading:

Details of how DIAL's search engine works;

Details of why search engines cannot find everything

Guided Tour

Assume you want to find any information you can about patents for software. Go to the World page. The simplest form of search you can enter is 'patent software' (one word for each concept you are interested in). View the search results. Although you find over 20,000 'Web pages found' that use one or both of your search terms, the best pages are at the top of the list.

3.2. Limiting search scope by catalog location - the 'in' options

The scope of a search is limited by which page in the World Law catalog you search from. This makes it easier to do more precise searches, because you can use the structure of the catalog to narrow down which web sites you wish to search. This is an unusual and powerful feature of World Law / DIAL, but it requires understanding and careful use. This 'limited scope searching' is the default search option in World Law, so you must change it if you want to search over all web sites that World Law makes searchable. (Searches over Categories are over the whole catalog and do not have restricted scope).

For example, if you go to the World >> Law Reform page the search window is as below.

The default 'in' option says that the scope of the search is 'Law Reform' , which means that a search will only find pages on web sites that are indexed under the category 'Law Reform', or under any of the subcategories listed on the 'World >> Law Reform' page (or subcategories of those pages). The result should be that the 'Web pages found' for any search from this page should only list sites that have to do with law reform.

To broaden or narrow your search scope, go to a broader or narrower page in the catalog (see examples below).

Sometimes a limited scope search result will include some materials that are not expected (eg case law may be included in a search that is supposed to be restricted to legislation). This problem of 'leakage' is caused by the structure of some sites that the web spider is sent to, which make it impossible to distinguish case law from legislation.

Guided Tour

Go to the World >> Law Reform page and search for law reform reports on insolvency by typing 'insolvency' in the text window and clicking 'Search'. Note the range of jurisdictions and organisations from which the law reform reports come, including the UK, Alberta (Canada), South Africa, the American Bar Association (re Bosnia) and UNCITRAL. Note that the reports of some law reform bodies (eg New Zealand) cannot be searched.
To search over all legislation from countries all over the world (but not other materials) go to the World>>Legislation page. Search for the insurance law concept of subrogation by typing 'subrogation' in the text window and clicking 'Search'. Note the number of web pages found (over 500), and the range of jurisdictions from which they come (including China, the European Communities, and various US jurisdictions). Note also the small amount of 'leakage' of case law into the legislation.
For an even narrower search, go the World >> Countries >> United States of America >> Legislation page and search from there, you will only search over US legislation, and not other US materials, nor legislation from other countries. Search for 'subrogation' again, and compare the results to those of the previous search.

Changing the default search scope to search 'All World Law'

However, no matter where you are in the catalog, you can still search over everything by changing the 'in' option from the default setting, and instead selecting 'All World Law', as shown below:

Alternatively, you can simply go to the 'World' page and search from there. Searching from the 'World' page has the same effect as changing the 'in' option to 'All World Law'.

Guided Tour

Go back to the World >> Countries >> United States of America >> Legislation page. Change the 'in' option to 'All World Law' and search for 'subrogation' again. Note that this time the search result includes over 1,000 items and that many of the documents are not legislation.

Limited scope searching - difference between 'See' and 'See also' (@)

As explained above under 'Browsing', links to pages for some subcategories have an '@' symbol following them. This has implications for limited scope searching, depending on whether the subcategory appears under the heading 'See Also:' or not (there is no 'See' subheading):

See Also - Where a subcategory appears on a page under the heading 'See Also:', it will always have '@' following it. Searches from the page on which the 'See Also:' appears will not search over web sites listed only on the sub-categories under 'See also'. Another way of putting it is that 'searches do not follow See Also'.
See - In all other cases, the only significance of the '@' symbol is that it takes you to a different part of the browsing hierarchy. Searches from the page on which subcategories followed by '@' appears will search over those sub-categories.

Guided Tour

The World >> Law Reform page is an example of a page where all the links to countries have '@' following, because they are all 'See references'. A search from this page will search all of the law reform sites on these country pages.
The Subject Index >> Foreign Investment page contains a 'See Also:' subcategory for 'Privatisation@' because although they are related topics, if you are trying to limit a search to only find materials on foreign investment, then you do not want to also search privatisation. A search from this page will not search privatisation sites, only foreign investment sites.

Search strategies - useful tips

Here are some suggestions about when it is useful to search over a restricted search scope:

The 'All World Law' option is the fastest way to search. But the more restricted search scopes may give greater precision. Test for what works best.
If your search fails to produce as many results as expected, it may be because you have accidentally searched over a restricted scope rather than over 'All World Law' or from the 'World' page.
If you do use a restricted search scope, it is always best to check whether you have missed anything important by also doing an 'All World Law' search. The safest approach is to do both types of searches.
Restricted scope searching works best from pages which have many sub-categories and/or many sites linked from them. Examples of pages where the default scope search will work well are:

The World>>Legislation page.
The World>>Law Journals page
The Australia page - a country with lots of sub-categories.

Restricted scope searching does not work well from pages which have had little material catalogued on them. There may be a lot of web pages concerning a country or subject which are searchable in the World Law system, but which have not yet been linked from that page.

Guided Tour

Go to the World>>Law Journals page. Have a look at the wide range of Law Journals available on the web. This is the type of page where a limited scope search will work well. Search for 'subrogation' again and this time you will find over 70 items which are mainly law journal articles, or case notes from law journals, but with some 'leakage' of other materials.
From the same page, try a search for 'piracy'. The result is over 170 items, almost all of which are law journal articles.
If I want to do a search for law in Bhutan concerning the environment, simply searching for 'environment' on the Bhutan page will not give a useful result, because there are too few web sites catalogued on the Bhutan page. A better result will be obtain by running the stored search 'Search All World Law: Bhutan' and then modifying it by adding 'environment near' .

Stored Searches

Many pages in World Law contain a number of Stored Searches, located in the bottom section of the page in a box with the title 'Stored Searches'. The stored searches otherwise eppear to be links to other web sites, but they are in fact pre-defined searches of World Law, each with a different search scope.

The main advantages of these pre-defined searches over normal links are that:

the search is updated every time the link is accessed;
the expertise of World Law's indexing staff is used to create the stored search, which may be a higher level of expertise in searching than that of most World Law users.

Guided Tour

See the Privatisation page for examples of stored searches on a subject index page. Other than the search over All World Law (which searches everything), each stored search has a different limited search scope.
The Kazakhstan page (like every other country page in World Law) has a Stored Search 'Search All World Law: Kazakhstan'. This gives over 2,500 items concerning law and Kazakhstan, by searching for the stored search terms '( kazakstan* or kazakhstan* or kazachstan or kazajstan or cazaquistao or kasachstan or kazakistan )' (various spellings of the country's name).

3.3. Search terms - synonyms, truncation and plurals

Searches in World Law / DIAL will only find the words that you specify as search terms.

Synonyms - You should always try to think of synonyms for your search terms. Instead of searching for 'gun' it is better to search for 'gun or firearm or pistol' (in a Boolean query) or 'gun firearm pistol' in an 'any of these words' search. However, you should not do this in an 'all of these words' search, as this will restrict your search results to documents that contain all of the words.
Plurals - Regular plurals, and singulars, and searched automatically (eg `firearm' finds `firearms' and vice-versa; `treaty' finds `treaties' and vice-versa). You do not need to put these variations in your search terms.
Truncation - Always consider truncation in order to find the different forms of a word. Truncation does not affect 'all of these words' searches - a document only needs to contain one form of the truncated word.

Use * for truncation eg `negligen*' finds negligent, negligence, negligently etc;
Use ? as a single wildcard eg 'privati?ation', 'licen?e', to find both American and English spellings.

Check your spelling - A large percentage of all failed searches are due to mis-spelled search terms. If a search fails, check that your search terms are correctly spelled.

An important thing to remember is the choice of search terms is influenced by which search option (discussed below) has been selected.

Guided Tour

Go to the World page to test these ways of improving search terms. After each search, you should come back to the World page.
Do a search for 'privatization' and note the number of results. It can also be spelled 'privatisation' (ie with an 's' not a 'z'). Do a search for 'privati?ation' (ie a '?' instead of either 's' or 'z') and compare the number of items found. It is almost twice as many.
If you wish to research laws about pollution, you need to find all these terms: pollution, polluter, pollutes, polluted, polluting, polluted. First, do a search just for 'pollution', and note the number of results. Then do a search for 'pollut*' and note the number of results. It is at least 20% more.
To find laws concerning pollution of water resources, you could search for 'water' but a better search is for 'river catchment watercourse water stream'. It finds about 25% more.
To search for laws on water pollution you can join the two sets of search terms and search for 'pollut* river catchment watercourse water stream'. Do this search using the 'any of these words' default option.

3.4. Search options - from the 'Find' menu

The default option is 'any of these words', which is the simplest way to search. If you want to do any other type of search, you must change this default, by holding down the mouse over 'any of these words' and selecting one of the other options shown below.

The following five options are available from beside 'Find' on the search window:

any of these words [the default option] - This means 'give me any documents which use one or more of my search terms, with the best documents listed first'. More technically, it is equivalent to a Boolean OR between each separate word, with the results ranked in order of likely relevance (explained later). This is the 'simple search' option, but often as effective as any other. Normally, users will simply enter a few words to indicate the main concepts for which they are looking (eg 'pollution river' or 'program patent').

Users can also enter text in any form (eg `I want laws on tax and bankruptcy' or `tax taxation bankrupt bankruptcy') without knowing about search connectors, truncation etc. Results are ranked according to likely relevance, so the user will (usually) obtain a useful list of search results, although often not as complete as a boolean search can provide. This is the search method recommended for inexperienced users, and is the default option.

all of these words - This means 'give me only those documents that contain all of my search terms'. Technically , this is equivalent to a Boolean AND between each separate word. This is a restrictive search and should be used with care. In most cases, 'any of these words' is a better choice, because items which contain all of the search terms will still be at the top of the ranked list of results, but other valuable items which contain some but not all of the search terms may also be found.
this phrase - This option is used to search for exact phrases such as 'fit and proper person' or 'contract of insurance'. The words entered will be treated as a literal phrase even if they contain terms which would normally otherwise be treated as Boolean connectors (such as 'and', 'or' , 'near') in a boolean search. There is no need to put inverted commas around the phrase.
this document title - Only the titles of Web pages are searched, not the text. Only exact phrases may be searched for with this option. This option is not used very often, but is useful for finding Acts by searching for parts of their exact title.
this Boolean query - This is the most sophisticated search option, and can be used to do any of the searches allowed by the four simpler options above. Any Boolean search may be entered, using AustLII's logical and proximity operators This is the most powerful form of searching, where searches can be made using boolean and proximity connectors, and the results are then also ranked in likely order of relevance. This allows reasonably broad searches (to aid completeness) with the relevance ranking then providing more precision.

Important note: The search connectors used for the 'Boolean query' search option (including 'and', 'or' and 'near') cannot be used as search connectors with any of the other four options. If they are used they will either be ignored, or may distort search results. Be careful not to use 'and', 'or' and 'near' except in 'Boolean query' searches or if they are part of a phrase in a 'this phrase' search or a 'this document title' search.

World Law uses AustLII's SINO search engine, so all of the search facilities available for searching over AustLII's Australian databases can be used to search World Law. There is Full SINO Documentation available for those who want more technical details of search functions.

Guided Tour

Go to the World page to test the differences between these search options. After each search, you should come back to the World page.
In the previous guided tour you searched for laws on water pollution using the search 'pollut* river catchment watercourse water stream', using the any of these words default option.
Change the search option to all of these words. If you do the same search for 'pollut* river catchment watercourse water stream', only a very small number of items will be retrieved. With this option you can only use one term for each concept you wish to find. If you only wanted to know about pollution of catchment areas, a good search would be 'pollut* catchment' - try it.
There is a Convention On Wetlands Of International Importance Especially As Waterfowl Habitat. (February 02, 1971 Ramsar, Iran). To find documents discussing this Convention change the search option to this phrase and search for 'Wetlands Of International Importance'. The search results will include both the Convention itself and many documents discussing it.
To find only the text of the Convention in the example above (rather than documents discussing it as in the above example), change the search option to this document title and search for 'Wetlands Of International Importance'. The results should display a small number of versions of the Convention itself, or amendments to it.
Change the search option to this Boolean query. This option allows you to search for law on water pollution using more complex searches. Try a search for 'pollut* near (river or catchment or watercourse or water or stream)' for a more precise and better set of results than the previous searches.

Boolean queries - Search connectors and operators

For Boolean queries, World Law /DIAL allows the use of a wide range of search connectors, which are summarised below.

Operator	Meaning	Example
and	page contains both terms	negligen* and defam*
or	page contains either of two terms	weapon or gun or firearm
not	page contains 1st term but not 2nd	trust not family
near	1st term within 50 words of 2nd	disclos* near offence
w/n or /n/	1st term within n words of 2nd	court w/5 jurisdiction
pre/n	1st term must precede 2nd term by less than n words	contempt pre/3 court

The Boolean Operators Chart gives more detailed explanations and examples of all of these search connectors.

Always use parentheses if you use more than one type of connector in a search. For example, a search for 'licence near radio or broadcasting' will find all references to 'broadcasting' whether or not the word 'licence' is within 50 words. The correct search is 'licence near (radio or broadcasting)'. The safe rule of thumb is always to use parentheses if a search uses more than one type of connector.

3.5. Display of search results - Categories and Web pages

A search finds two types of results:

'Web pages found' - the full text of pages of web sites listed in the catalog. The search return results as 'Web pages found' if your search matches words found on any pages of web sites that our web spider has been able to download and index.
'Categories in this index' - the text of pages of the World Law catalog itself. The search returns results as 'Categories in this Index' if your search matches words found on pages (categories) in the catalog.

The results of a search over the catalog is displayed first as 'Web pages found:

To see the categories that have been found, you can either scroll down past the 50 web pages, or click on the words 'Categories in this Index'

Only 50 ' Web pages found' and 50 'Categories' are displayed on the first page. Select ' |2| ' , ' |3| ' etc to see more web pages or more categories.

3.6. Display of search results - relevance ranking

Search results are displayed ranked by likely order of relevance of the items founds, as in the example below. If the first item in the list has the score '100%' this means it contains all of the search terms (3 in the example below), and otherwise has the highest occurrence of the search terms (and other factors used to measure likely relevance). All other items are then ranked pro-rata, and given an appropriate percentage score.

The percentage score gives you a rough indication of how likely it is that the document is sufficiently relevant to your search purpose to be worth reading. A score of 90% indicates that it is very likely to be relevant, but a score of 30% means this is unlikely.

3.7. Modifying searches

It is easy to modify searches, because the Search Results page always displays your current search (or stored search) at the top of the page, allowing it to be modified and another search run.

Guided Tour

You need to find out about patent law in Kazakhstan. Go to the Kazakhstan page. Click on the Stored Search 'Search All World Law: Kazakhstan' - this gives over 2,500 items concerning law and Kazakhstan . To find items only about patents, add the words 'patent near' to the stored search terms '( kazakstan* or kazakhstan* or kazachstan or kazajstan or cazaquistao or kasachstan or kazakistan )' and click on 'Search' again.

3.8. Searching a selected site

Where World Law's web spider has been sent to a site, the icon

appears next to the catalog listing. If you click on the words 'Search' or the

icon, then you are taken to a 'Search Selected Site' page which limits the scope of the search only to the one site selected. You can use this to search sites that do not have their own search engine.

Note: You cannot amend a search over a Selected Site from the 'Search Results' page, because the amended search will search the whole of World Law (not just the Selected Site). Go back to the page headed 'Search Selected Site', and amend the search there.

Guided Tour

Go to the International Court of Justice page, and click on next to the International Court of Justice Home page. Search for cases about extradition (hint: search for 'extradit*'). Then go to the Court's Home page and use the search engine provided on the site.

[Previous] [Next] [Up] [Title]