There is a new search engine in town. It’s called “PreCYdent.” PreCYdent is a free service, which will eventually be ad-supported, and hopes to become a contender in the legal search provider market currently dominated by Westlaw and LexisNexis. PreCYdent hopes to bring open access and 21st century technology to legal searches, effectively making searching case law as easy as running a search on Google.

I decided to give PreCYdent a trial run to see how it compares to Westlaw and LexisNexis.

Natural Language Search

PreCYdent is miles ahead of both Lexis and Westlaw when it comes to natural language search capability. A natural language search is the simplest form of a search, and it is how most people use Google: just type in what you are looking for and hit “search.” Boolean searches, on the other hand, depend on the use of Boolean operators such as “and,” “or,” and “not” to allow very specific queries. For example, the use of the “/s” or “w/s” operators between search terms on Westlaw and Lexis respectively will limit the search results to cases where the terms searched for appear within the same sentence.

To test the natural language search capabilities of Westlaw, LexisNexis, and PreCydent I ran a search for “arrest warning” without the quotes to see where Miranda ranked in the results.

Lexis

(Click on images for full-size)

Miranda was the 25th result on Lexis using the Natural Language search function. The query was “arrest warning” (without the quotes) in the Supreme Court Database.

Westlaw

Miranda was the 6th result on Westlaw using the Natural Language Search. The query was “arrest warning” (without the quotes). The search was limited to the Supreme Court Database.

PreCYdent

Miranda was the very first hit, even without limiting the search to Supreme Court cases as I had for Lexis and West.

While PreCYdent provides excellent search results, the service is not without limitations. In a future post, I will cover the limitations of PreCYdent, some features unique to PreCYdent, and the utility of PreCYdent to lawyers, law students, and the general public.

Update: Part II