freelawbot
commented
10 years ago Closed freelawbot closed 10 years ago
freelawbot
commented
10 years ago freelawbot
commented
10 years ago This could be a useful tool for this kind of thing, though I imagine it will bring in too much complication/dependency: http://documentcloud.github.com/visualsearch/
Original Comment By: Mike Lissner
freelawbot
commented
10 years ago I've been meaning to say for some time that adding a state's appellate court decisions (such as California) is probably the most likely / easiest major new content area to branch into. However, before doing that, it would help us to adopt a concept used by LEXIS/WL of "Databases." Before you conduct a search both sites let you choose from the following databases of opinions:
Right now we default to something like: All Federal Appellate (because that's all we offer) but it's easy to imagine a user that doesn't want California state opinions cluttering her federal court research and so if we add something new then providing users with a familiar way to limit their search at the outset (or after results are presented) will be important.
Anyway, perhaps this notion of "Databases" and of clustering together some of our ca1, ca2, ... scotus tags into "databases" can inform the process of creating faceted search.
Original Comment By: Brian Carver
freelawbot
commented
10 years ago Did some analysis on this over the last couple days, in terms of which facets make sense in the sidebar.
A couple thoughts:
I think the above will provide us with all the current functionality that is available in the advanced section, and then some. What I didn't put in the above are the various punctuation-based query modifiers, like (dog | cat), "Dogs snuggling cats", dog -puppy, etc. I think we can live with those going only into the query bar for now, but we need to think about how we expose them so people know they can use them.
Time permitting, I might try to sketch this up at some point soon, and then the next step will be to design the URL API, then the backend functionality. jbward, you mentioned you'd be able to work on this soon. You ready to start cracking on the front end?
Thoughts?
Footnotes of design inspiration: http://search.techcrunch.com/query.php?s=foo Google, Yahoo, Bing, Twitter, Kayak
Original Comment By: Mike Lissner
freelawbot
commented
10 years ago Much discussion of this has recently happened. Plan of action is something like:
* Move the side bar from the right to the left site-wide, and consider it the **"user interaction area,"** where users go to click things, do things, etc. On case pages, user actions will continue to go here. Putting them on the left is a big change, but it needs to happen to promote faceted search and user actions.
* Change the URL structure slightly. Currently result pages are at: /search/results/?q=cat. That'll continue to work, but there will be other optional GET variables for court, casename, casenumber, etc. So it'll be /search/results/?q=cat&casename=ca1&casenumber=42. This will allow easier parsing of variables on the backend, because rather than getting a single variable on the backend with content like "query = cat dog @court ca1 @casenumber 42," you get multiple variables: "query = cat dog; court = ca1; casenumber = 42".
* Homepage remains the same, so there is a clear call to action on the homepage, followed by results and a faceted search UI (similar to Google).Original Comment By: Mike Lissner
freelawbot
commented
10 years ago freelawbot
commented
10 years ago (Reply via mli...@michaeljaylissner.com):
An example of this pattern I have been considering is Kayak.com, could be very useful.
Original Comment By: Mike Lissner
Many sites provide easy ways to apply filters to search results with the click of a button, such as comparison shopping sites or even retail sites. On this site if one were browsing the "all opinions" list it would be nice to have buttons on the side that could be clicked to remove the results from any particular circuit, to exclude the unpublished cases, or text boxes to add additional search terms, or to add additional requirements on the casename. It clutters the interface a little bit (unless done well) but I think it might add handy functionality that is sort of equivalent to the query builder, but provided in the right margin of search results as a quick way to make the results better.