I’ve been toying with the idea for while, since I discovered Google Co-op. Why not a search engine dedicated to legal resources/information/commentary, bringing together the scattered information and comment that is already out there?
So, with a small parp of the trumpets, here is an alpha version. It is also accessible via the ‘Law search’ tab at the top of the page. Note that this search only covers freely accessible sites. Closed commercial sites will not show up.
There are over [edit] 90 sites in the list so far (and much thanks to Delia Venables for the superb work in collating and organising resources). But although I’m adding sites for searching at the moment, I feel that it is a bit weak in criminal and family sources (and perhaps corporate as well – assuming there are any free ones). [I’m in the process of adding in conveyancing and property, mental health, immigration and more family sites. Intellectual property, Public law, trusts, agriculture and shipping will be strengthened soon].
Any and all suggestions for sites (preferably as top level urls) are welcomed as long as they contain useful resources rather than mere publicity.
email contact (a) nearlylegal.co.uk
I hope people find this useful. Please let me know. [Once the thing appears to be reasonably functional, I’m happy for anyone to add the search box to their sites, but it is distinctly pre-beta at the moment].
Try this?
http://www.infolaw.co.uk/cse/blawgle.htm?cx=012802228971852518514:ud44smghk3u&q=&cof=FORID:9
Thanks, yes I had seen that and took it as a model (Thanks Nick Holmes).
I’ve got many of the blawgs in this search list and will be adding the rest. This search also includes statute, case law, commentary and other resources as well as blawgs, which is why it is very much a work in progress…
This looks great and I will certainly use it. BIALL (The British and Irish Association of Law Librarians) have a similar website called LORD, which lists resources available on commercial databases http://www.biall.org/lord.asp it’s being updated at present.
Since you are filtering Google results, I think the user has to clearly understand and be happy with the context. Narrow context is good for a specific purpose – as Blawgle or eg all the subsites with judgments on them. Wider might seem better – eg cases legislation other legal info sites, such as you have . But I find myself unsatisfied with the tests I have done as I always know there’s a whole lot of nuggets missing which I would get with an intelligent Google web search. I’ll email you further.
Nick
Nick, those are a couple of very good points.
To the first, yes the context needs to be clear. I’ll work on making that clear.
On the second, I wondered about this. I was tempted to create a range of context specific searches (Statute, blogs and so on). In the end I decided to try an ‘all in’ model, so case reports and commentary would appear together. I’ll persevere with this to see how it goes.
However, there are always missing nuggets (story of my life). Partly this is why I ask for suggestions of sites to add – I cannot cover the whole range myself, obviously. The other choice is between a strictly limited search – of listed sites only – or what google calls ‘prioritising results’ from listed sites. This would hypothetically pick up nuggets, but I haven’t been happy with the amount of wholly irrelevant material that seems to appear high up the results. I may need to experiment with this some more.
There is a lot missing from this search at the moment, I’m adding sites as and when I can, which is why it is billed as alpha. It is certainly not ready for prime time.
I’ll keep playing with this model for a while, but you’ve given me food for thought.