Searching

Searching Research

We have been trying to better understand the language in use by our users in the search solution we use, and in order to do that, the Lawi Project have been trying to determine what tools and techniques one might use to do that.

In several cases, 80 percent of your searches are accounted for by the top 45% most commonly-used terms. In other words, it takes approximately 45% of distinct terms to account for 80% of all searches – that is a lot of terms!.

In other cases, it reaches 80% of searches at about 39% of distinct terms.

Month to Month Re-Use of Search Terms

In the Lawi Project, we began to wonder about the overall re-use of terms over periods of time.

In other words, even while commonality of re-using terms within a month is relatively low, how much commonality do the Lawi Project see in our users’ language (i.e., search terms) from month to month?

Surprisingly, the average overlap between months was a shockingly low 13.2%. In other words, from our research, over 86% of the terms in any given month were not used at all in the previous month.

This figure goes up to an average of 36.2% in case of reflecting that the terms that are re-used in a subsequent month among the most common terms overall.

Our research shows, therefore that the amount of commonality from month-to-month among the terms used is very low. It provides another reason, we think, why it is very hard to meaningfully improve search across the language of the users of the Lawi Project.

In general, there are some search tools in the Encyclopedia of Law platform:

• Advanced Tips in the Legal Encyclopedias: This page focuses on using search engine Advanced Search to get more specific search results.
• Systems Search in the Legal Encyclopedias:Legal Research Systems and Search. Results The Encyclopedia of Law use Headnotes, Titles and Labels to organize and summarize all statutes, cases and entries.
• Customized Search of the Legal Encyclopedias:There a large amount of websites containing useful legal information, but with relatively few sites linking to them.
• Search Tools for the Legal Encyclopedias, including Search Tips. Note that more advanced tips are available in this Portal. Start Simple. Start with just a few terms. Do not include every possible word.
• Thesaurus Search in the Legal EncyclopediasA thesaurus provides a standard language or set of terms with which to describe a topic. Use thesaurus terms to help retrieve the maximum search results.
• Popular Searches in the Legal Encyclopedias