Published in P.S., the journal of Probate Section, June 2000
Part of this article originally appeared in the Solicitors Journal, February 2000
Most organisations of any size now have websites. Indeed it is frequently the case that an organisation’s web address is the most prominent (and sometimes the only) form of address appearing in its advertisements. There are also many millions of individuals and very small organisations who also have websites. Collectively these sites provide a huge and valuable resource for information and exchange. But the sheer size of this resource requires
Which websites are the most useful to the lawyer? What do they offer? and How can they be found? This article answers these questions in overview, with some detailed help on using search engines. Subsequent articles will look in more detail at using the web to assist probate practice in particular.
If you have a particular comment, query or problem relating to probate practice on the web, please email it to NickHolmes@infolaw.co.uk and I will take account of it in subsequent articles.
The ‘legal web’
The sites that will be most immediately useful to the UK lawyer I refer to as the ‘UK legal web’. These include:
- Government, the parliaments and the courts. Official sites provide free access to primary legal materials, other official documents and guidance, rules, forms and a variety of other information to assist your practice.
- Lawyers. Your associates and competitors’ sites are naturally generally aimed at attracting and retaining clients. However, on many sites there is much useful material which can assist the small practitioner with otherwise limited information resources, including commentary on legal developments, briefings, newsletters, articles, checklists and precedents. They will also, of course, be useful as a reference point in developing your own web services.
- Law associations. The websites of the Law Society and the many specialist associations provide much useful information directly relevant to your practice.
- Law schools. Many law schools have been long-established on the web and their websites provide a wealth of materials.
- Commercial law publishers, both the more established and the newer breed of information providers, provide a variety of free materials. The higher value information services are generally charged on annual subscription and have yet to make much impact except at the top end of the market.
- There are many other non-profit organisations relevant to your practice publishing a wide range of information.
- Don’t forget many of your suppliers are online. Books, office supplies, law stationery, legal staff – all are available now over the web.
Gateways to the legal web
How does one gain access to all these useful sites without wasting hours of fruitless endeavour? One needs an effective jumping off point, or – in current parlance – a ‘portal’.
A portal (or gateway), as the word implies, is a site designed to facilitate access to the web. Portals are flavour of the month these days, as a successful site can attract a high volume of traffic which will in turn attract advertising revenue and other commercial opportunities. There are many pretenders to the UK legal portal throne, with as many different approaches. Given the democratic nature of the web, it is unlikely that any one will establish dominance. I can do no better than recommend you first visit the infolaw gateway at www.infolaw.co.uk which I maintain [picture: infolaw.bmp]. This provides a classified index of the UK legal web, including browsable listings of lawyers, government and legal resources by topic, selected for relevance and quality, plus classified listings of suppliers, topical articles on developments in the UK legal web (including this article) and other features. Included also is a listing of other legal gateways.
Finding things on the web
The web consists of probably more than a billion pages of information and an elite handful of services, including such names as Alta Vista, Excite, Infoseek, Lycos, Yahoo and Google have established themselves as robust and efficient solutions to searching the whole of the web (though none indexes every page).
The vast majority of web users simply type a few words into a search box and see what happens. It seems sensible therefore to concentrate on two key factors determining the relevance of your search results: choosing the ‘right’ search engine and choosing search terms carefully.
Choosing a search engine
Most search engines will return results for pages that contain any of your search terms, ranking results by weighting some or all of the following:
- the number of search terms matched
- the frequency of occurrence of the terms
- the part of the page in which the terms are found (ie title, body text, keywords etc)
- the proximity of the terms
- the order in which you entered the terms
Though these search engines will return millions of hits, the most relevant sites will generally be contained on the first half-dozen pages. Even so, there will be a number of results on those first pages which (for one reason or another) are not relevant and many relevant results which are buried much deeper down the list and likely never to be seen. Also the ranking applied may at best seem haphazard.
Google (www.google.com), a relatively new search engine, uses an entirely different approach and in my view stands head and shoulders above the rest.
Google returns results for pages that contain all your search terms, ranking pages according to their popularity (according to how many other pages link to them) and according to the proximity of your search terms. Google also exerpts the text that matches your query.
Google’s page ranking method deserves further explanation. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote by page A for page B. Google assesses a page’s importance by the votes it receives and also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves important weigh more heavily and help to make other pages important.
Google’s page ranking system is therefore a general indicator of importance and does not depend on a specific query. Rather, it is a characteristic of a page itself based on data from the web that Google analyzes. It precludes human interference – so no one can ‘purchase’ a higher rank or commercially alter results.
Choosing your search terms
It is of course very difficult to generalise about the use of search terms, but it is worth bearing in mind always that a web search engine has indexed the whole of the web and you should therefore be aiming as much to screen out or demote the irrelevant or low value sites as to find the relevant.
A few pointers therefore for selecting terms for ‘legal’ searches:
- Use terms that lawyers rather than laymen would use. This will screen out for example many ‘law for the layman’ sites.
- As an extension of the above, use titles to Acts, SIs etc which are bound to be referred to. This will screen out or demote for example low value information pages on law firm ‘brochure’ sites.
- If you are researching local law, include UK or England or Scotland as appropriate as a search word. This will demote sites concerned with overseas jurisdictions, including of course US sites, but also Australian and Commonwealth sites whose terminology is more similar.
More about search engines
A wealth of information about search engines is on the SearchengineWatch site at www.searchenginewatch.com.
