When it comes to online search, I stick pretty close to Google unless I am doing something unusual. A deep Web search service called Biznar came onto my radar recently and I thought I would try it out.
“Deep Web” typically means database driven content that is inaccessible to the average (Google, Bing) search index spiders. It can mean things like law journals in HeinOnline or case law in LexisNexis or Westlaw. Deep Web tools will have permission or some ability to access the contents of those systems, sometimes providing you with access to the content from the Web rather than through a subscription.
Biznar has a couple of things going for it that make it worth adding to your legal research toolkit. First, it actually has law-related sources, so you are likely to get relevant legal information. It is also great for business and other resources, but you can get that elsewhere.
The search results come back in clusters, so you can quickly do filtering based on author, publication, date, and so on. This faceted search is familiar to anyone who shops online but I haven’t seen it really work well on Web search yet.
The clincher for me is that Biznar plays to my research laziness. You can save a search as an alert and it will mail you updated matches to it. You can also save your search as an RSS feed, so if you are watching a topic – or a client or an opponent – you can get constant updates.
A link near the top, below the search box, shows collection status, which tells you what Biznar successfully searched. This helps you see if there were any errors, but also gives you a quick peek at your source list. Government sites are US focused, but you will see HeinOnline content returned through Google Scholar, as well as practice area specific results like EDGAR information. The advanced search allows you to pre-specify your sources, so you can limit a search to whole cluster, like Government, or drill down to specifics. Even searching a single site with Biznar may be better than searching the site itself, if you can set up an alert to monitor future changes.
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