Openlaws.com is a free specialized search engine that covers worldwide relevant legal content. The search is built on Google technology, but the results are filtered so that only related legal information is displayed.
If you try doing legal research using standard search engines like Google and Yahoo, numerous search results will be displayed that are irrelevant to your study. Hence for such cases, we require Thematic Search Engines like OpenLaws.com.
Thematic Search Engines use optimization techniques to provide a more significant and restricted set of pages based upon a certain set of themes, like for example, Medical, Legal, Academic etc.
OpenLaws allows you to further narrow down your search based on pre-defined categories like Government, Lawyers, Academia, Journals and more.
We tried a few search strings and the results were impressive and entirely related to the legal aspect of our search.
1. Navigate to openlaws.com
2. Type in any search string for which you want to perform some legal research and Enter
3. The thematic results pertaining to law will be displayed
4. Use the predefined categories or search operators to further narrow and refine your search
You can use various combinations of Search Operators supported by Google like ‘and’, ‘or’, ‘site:’, ‘define’ etc. to produce a more refined search. Click here to learn more about these operators. Also, search results are sortable by relevance (default) and by date; after executing a search.
Verdict:
OpenLaws is an excellent free search tool and can be used as a starting point for any legal research as it covers thousands of legal websites with the entire focus on law. There are other Legal Search engines available like lawfirmsearchengine and openlaw.org to name a few. Some of them are paid and others are unable to provide structured and categorized results like openlaws.
Go ahead and do some basic searching here. You will clearly notice the difference.
