Over the past two months, FindLaw has been working behind the scenes to improve its legal search engine LawCrawler. While the enhancements have not been officially announced, FindLaw President Tim Stanley outlined some of the changes in a recent e-mail message to the Law Librarians of the "law-lib" mailing list.

According to Stanley's e-mail, LawCrawler is now powered by Google and utilizes a "legal cut of their Web database of a billion+ pages," in addition to material found within FindLaw's own index of legal material. (Previously LawCrawler was powered by the AltaVista search engine.)

Stanley also highlighted the flexibility in manipulaitng search results with the new LawCrawler. "To narrowly focus searches, we have filters set up to search the US government, every US state, the major US government agencies and nearly every US law school," he said. Those wishing to see more results,"can quickly expand a search to the entire Google database," Stanley added. "[I]t is a click away."

A LawCrawler search in mid-May for the terms "children" and "internet" yielded zero results. Re-running the same search recently returned over one million results (not that quantity always equals quality), including references to the Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA) that we were searching for.

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