Steven Cohen over at Library Stuff points us to a blog post from Out of the Jungle letting us know about a new legal search engine from Xyggy. Yes, that's quite a name. (-:
Xyggy is home to several searchable databases with the most recent addition being Xyggy Legal.
The ResourceShelf team wants to spend some quality time with Xyggy but here's a brief overview.
The primary concept in play is the belief that, "search should be item-based not just text-based." What's an item?
Documents, web pages, images, music, publications, medical records, proteins, news articles, people profiles, movies, products, sounds, newswires, patents, books, customer profiles, legal cases, resumes and many more are all examples of items.
The explanation on home page continues:
A text search returns web pages or documents containing the keywords in ranked order. Item search returns similar items in ranked order.
Text search is fine, to a point, but we live in a world of items not just keywords. Item search provides substantial advantages and additional information over keyword search. Item search is a more natural way of finding things.
Xyggy is about finding similar content.
Here's a List of the Databases Xyggy Currently Makes Available:
Cases covered include:
+ United States Supreme Court:
+ United States Reporter (U.S.): 1 - 544
+ United States Circuit Courts of Appeal:
+ Federal Reporter, Second Series (F.2d): 178 - 999
+ Federal Reporter, Third Series (F.3d): 1 - 491
Case coverage is incomplete for recent years and Xyggy will endeavor to complete the collection in the future.
The interface for all data collections consists of a search box (where you search for similar patents, articles, etc.) with a box directly below it that is populated with results.
More on Xyggy in the near future.
UPDATE: The Out of the Jungle post includes some comments from the Xyggy CEO.
He writes:
With item-search you are literally passing an entire document as the query. In fact with Xyggy, queries can contain one or more documents and it will find all similar documents in ranked order. Xyggy is a different search paradigm and as such is not comparable to how text-search works.
Text-search with or without advanced options finds documents containing the query keywords. But, do users want to find documents with specific keywords or do they want to find similar documents? Maybe they want to do both but only the former option has been available to date.
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