They have many different types of searches, but the two applicable to this discussion are (as they are written on the site) both "terms & connectors" and "natural language." T&C works well using your standard OR/AND/etc. However, natural language works so much better even though you type in the exact same words.
The natural language search returns cases more on point and has one awesome feature: the most relevant text is in red type, set apart from the rest of the case. From the natural language search West is better able to determine what the legal researcher wants and shows it to him.
I spent almost 2 years of law school searching using terms and connectors because I thought the same thing as you do. But I recently converted when I realized West returns better results from their natural language search.
Are you able to compare, say, Wests results to those of a pure google text search on the keyword terms?
[ To do that you'd need some example of large legal texts fully online and thus indexed by google - I dont know if that exists ]
Its sometimes hard to discern the value of the tech versus the quality of the implementation + usability factors - but your observations are interesting. I wonder how search on medical information compares...
gord.
Is this something you'd enjoy hacking on?
There's a rule of thumb saying that your solution to a problem has to be 2 - 300% better than the existing state of the art for it to be adapted successfully without artificial help (marketing $, monopolies, etc.) and Google certainly lived up to that when it went live. It remains to be seen whether Wolfram Alpha will.
It'll probably be another case of Powerset or Cuil, lots of hype by the company in question that is impossible to live up to.
I tried out MS Live Search, thinking that a company with as much money to throw at things as Microsoft would probably be of similar quality to Google. I quickly got frustrated when most of the search results were nothing like what I was looking for. Meanwhile Google consistently gave exactly what I wanted near the top of their results page.
What I'm saying is that technology does matter. There are other brand-name titans in the world.
But you don't have to play within Googles rules.. theres lots of territory between text search [=cool] and Natural Language [=sucks, to a first order approximation].
For example, just treat data as a graph of tagged pieces of text.. and give a good web interface to that. Bypass all the RDF, semantic web hype and just make something workable, usable. A wiki for data.
anyone looking for a co-founder? Im working on this.
