Design and empirical evaluation of search software for legal professionals on the WWW

Our research focuses on designing effective search aids for legal researchers interested in law-related information on the world wide web. In this paper we report on the design and evaluation of two software systems developed to explore models for browsing and searching across a user-selected set of WWW sites. A directory services tool, LIBClient, provides a hierarchical index of legal information resources in an interface emphasizing ease-of-use by Internet novices and management of multiple-site searching. To study the relative effectiveness of LIBClient in the hands of legal professionals, nineteen law students were observed using LIBClient and, in separate trials, the popular general-purpose search services to perform known-item searches within a fixed time limit. The experiment indicates the value of LIBClient for focused searching, most properly as a supplement to general-purpose search engines. Motivated by observations from the LIBClient study, a second retrieval experiment explores the effectiveness of a radically different LIBClient design in which the LIBClient interface is combined with a crawler-enhanced search engine, IRISWeb. The LIBClient–IRISWeb system enables full-text searching using natural language queries across a set of WWW pages collected by the IRISWeb crawler. The page harvesting process relies on a cascading set of filters to define the final set of WWW pages to be collected, including user selections in LIBClient, search results from site-specific search engines, and the hyperlink structure at target sites. To evaluate the LIBClient–IRISWeb method, the queries used in the user study are submitted to the system, with excellent retrieval results. In conclusion, our research points to the promise of WWW search tool designs that tightly couple directed browsing with query-based search capabilities using new forms of search automation.