"Cases Citing" page should link to the original case

[morninj]

E.g., https://www.courtlistener.com/ca2/3y9U/brandir-international-inc-v-cascade-pacific-lumber/cited-by/ should include a link to https://www.courtlistener.com/ca2/3y9U/brandir-international-inc-v-cascade-pacific-lumber/

[brianwc]

+1

[mlissner]

Huh? There's a link in the upper left that says "back to document", with a cute left arrow. Should we change the wording?

[morninj]

I arrived at that page from a list of search engine results, so "back to document" doesn't make much sense (and I missed it). It would be helpful to add a link under the heading that reads something like "Go to [citation]"—or link the heading itself.

[mlissner]

Gotcha, yeah. The thing I like about the current design is that different pages have different text in that spot:

• opinions have "Back to Search Results" if you arrived via CL search, or "Back to Homepage" if you arrived via Google
• cited-by and authorities pages have "Back to Document"

The hope being that people get used to having back arrows in that spot that allow them to go back to whence they came. For that reason, I'd like to keep the link where it is, but perhaps we can improve it somehow. It seems really obvious to me, but I look at this site all day every day, so my opinion is kind of useless, I suppose.

We could change the wording in that spot based on whether somebody got there from an opinion page:

• From an outside link: "← View this Opinion"
• From Opinion page: "← Back to Opinion"

Would that be enough, do you think?

[brianwc]

That would probably be better, but I think part of the problem is that people don't always look over at the left side-bar. We have that giant title sitting at the top of the screen that is the very name of the document we're talking about and it's just plain text and not hyperlinked. Couldn't we do both?

[mlissner]

Not to be too contrary, but that feels wrong to me because it'd make the titles inconsistent across pages and because it'd provide more than one way to do something, which I believe is a UI no-no.

I'll think some more about this but I have to say it seems really obvious to me already: It's in the upper left, it's got an action icon, it's colored as a link.

[morninj]

The problem for me was that I googled "brandir international v. cascade" and ended up here. I was looking for the text of the case. "Back to Document" was hard to see because it's intuitive to jump straight to the document text and ignore the navigational cruft (especially "back" and "forward" links). The link also did not suggest (to me, referred from Google) that it pointed to the case text.

[brianwc]

This is a weird problem I've noticed. Our cited-by pages get better Google placement than the opinion itself, so I imagine many Googlers land on our cited-by pages first.

On September 10, 2014 8:57:14 PM PDT, Joseph Mornin notifications@github.com wrote:

The problem for me was that I googled "brandir international v. cascade" and ended up here. I was looking for the text of the case. "Back to Document" was hard to see because it's intuitive to jump straight to the document text and ignore the navigational cruft (especially "back" and "forward" links). The link also did not suggest (to me, referred from google) that it pointed to the case text.

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Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub: https://github.com/freelawproject/courtlistener/issues/289#issuecomment-55216573

Sent from my Android phone with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity.

[morninj]

That is weird. The pages are very similar. It might be because validator shows six errors on the case page and only two errors on the cited-by page.

[mlissner]

Hm, our sitemaps already give the cited by pages less priority, but I think their higher ranking has to do with content...something about link ratio, or the quantity of text we show on the opinion page or something. There's really no telling, unfortunately.

I'll see about doing some tweaks on this UI at some point. Thanks @morninj.

[mlissner]

@morninj, thanks for this one, but I'm closing it. This page is now handled via the search results.

[mlissner]

Thanks again for pushing on it though. I sort of wish we had done something here, but I think the current outcome is even better.