100 Useful Niche Search Engines You’ve Never Heard Of provides links to yes, 100 search engines that provide services Google doesn’t.
Another great search tool is All My Favs, which links to web sites in numerous categories that the web site’s author has already vetted.
If you can’t find something on Google, try some of these sites or ask your librarian about these tools.
When you need to do research on a person, use the web search engine Pipl at www.Pipl.com. This search engine purports to search the “deep web” and does a great job of finding more information on anyone who is active on the Internet. Give it a try!
While researching banking laws, I came across an FDIC website that indicates the FDIC library has legislative histories available for the most important banking laws. I’m not sure how easily accessible the legislative histories are if you can’t make the trip to D.C., but the fact these exist may greatly relieve someone someday!
Also, here are some consumer protection websites that are helpful when researching consumer issues like credit cards:
1) Federal Reserve Board: Consumer Information
2) Washington State Attorney General on Safeguarding Consumers
Three recently developed websites are worth taking a look at if you’re looking for free case law, especially outside of Washington State. (As previously mentioned, www.legalwa.org is a great site for searching Washington-specific case law.)
All three sites mentioned below search U.S. Supreme Court cases, but have unique search engines that often return different results from the same search.
The first site is Precydent. This site allows you to refine your search by jurisdiction and to search using Boolean operators. You can also limit the search by date, and retrieve cases ranked by authority, date, or jurisdiction.
The next site is AltLaw, a joint project between the University of Colorado and Columbia University Law Schools. This site also allows advanced searching and Boolean searching, but does not search as many jurisdictions, particularly lower courts, as Precydent searches.
The third site is Public Library of Law. You can only search one jurisdiction at a time on this site, and there are no Boolean operators available to limit the search. Be aware that this site is sponsored by FastCase, and they may not allow full functionality without paying a fee.
In a recent podcast, Rita K. talks about these sites and others, incluidng FindLaw, the Legal Information Institute from Cornell, and LexisOne.
There are a number of good free web sites for searching case law. A good one for Washington State case law is www.legalwa.org. Recently, KCLL posted a tutorial on how to search the site for Washington Supreme and Appellate Court cases. Watch it and learn.