Non-Legal Research

Meta Search Engines

Comparisons and Ratings of Search Engines
Legal Research Metasites
The following sites contain directories of legal web sites. Some also have search engines that search legal sites only.

CILP is a joint effort between the Villanova University School of Law and the Illinois Institute of Technology's Chicago-Kent College of Law. CILP's collection of "locators"-- The Federal Court Locator, The State Court Locator, The Federal Web Locator, the State Web Locator, and the Tax Law Locator-- make it easy to find links to federal and state court opinions and government resources on the Web. Each locator is arranged in an index and is also fully searchable.
• Cornell's Legal Information Institute
  Indexes by topic and source, Supreme Court, New York court opinions, and much more. LII has pioneered many projects for distributing legal information via the Internet and has mounted materials such as the UCC, US Code, and Uniform Laws.
• FindLaw
  Huge collection of links to legal materials,everything from court opinions to consultants, and well maintained. Features LawCrawler, a sophisticated legal site search engine and full text searching of law journals on the Web.
• Hieros Gamos
  From Lex Mundi, an association of 133 firms worldwide, this is a truly international site with many links to foreign and international law firms, law schools, and legal materials. Textual versions of the site are in English, German, Spanish , French and Italian.
• Internet Law Library
  Maintained by Pritchard Law Webs, this site is fully searchable. The ILL is one of the most complete directories of online law on the web, with links to almost five thousand federal, state, foreign and international law sites (mainly governmental materials) originally compiled by the House of Representatives Law Library, now maintained by several different organizations. Alternate sites include:
  Current Legal ResourcesMenu driven, not searchable.
  
• WashLaw WEB
  From Washburn University, Topeka School of Law, the original indexer of the Web for law materials, an extensive collection of law and law-related links. Unique organization which includes specific topics with good descriptions of what you will find when you link to sites listed.
  
• Yahoo: Law
  From one of the most well known organizers of Web sites, this list is less selective about what is listed so you'll find the off-beat and unreliable along with the best.

• Altavista
  One of the most comprehensive indexes to the Web, but relevancy ranking can be poor. Allows you to do Boolean and field searching.
• BUBL LINK Catalogue of Selected Internet Resources
• Excite
  Allows "concept searching," which automatically searches for synonyms of search terms.
• Google
  The relevancy of the results from this search engine is amazing.
• Hotbot
  Hotbot offers many searching options and lets you restrict searches in various ways, but it is slow to load.
• Infomine: Scholarly Resource
  Searchable collection of scholarly web resources in Government, Medicine, Biology & Agriculture, Social Sciences & Humanities, Physical Sciences, Engineering, Computing and Math, and much more.
• MEDLINE
• Northern Light
  Winner of PC Magazine's Best Search Engine of the Year for 1998. Northern Light is a combination search engine/document delivery service. In addition to searching the web, Northern Light searches its own database. Northern Light offers many searching options and organizes your search results into "folders."
• Search.com
  This is a great resource for finding a subject specific search engine.
• Yahoo

• DogPile
  Metasearch of 13 WWW Search engines, 6 Usenet sources, and 2 FTP archives
• MetaCrawler
  Multi-Web Search of 6 major sites.
  This site received the PC Magazine Editor's Choice Award in the Metasearch category.
• SavvySearch

• Lycos Top 5% Sites
• Magellan Internet Guide
• Search Engines Compared: 1999 Update
• Yahoo Internet Life Reviews