Great write up, I too was ecstatic the day the legal portion of Google Scholar went live, but my excitement waned to some degree as I learned its limitations. Its a great “natural language” type of search system, much better in my opinion than Westlaw’s, but it lacks the precision that Westlaw’s “terms and connectors” search has.

I rely on the boolean type search of Westlaw to sift through the abundant caselaw out there to find what I am looking for. I can greatly cut down on the amount of time I spend finding cases if I precisely pick my terms. However, the boolean operators and limiters of Google Scholar, especially the legal portion, are sadly limited, greatly reducing its utility to me. Yes, I can find cases with it, but it generally is slower because of the abundance of cases that come up that aren’t on point.

That said, I love the speed of Google’s servers, blindingly fast in comparison to West’s snails. Westlaw continues to raise prices, but their servers are slow as ever. Furthermore, the citation system Google employs is great. Much more intuitive than West’s in my opinion, and very useful. Not perfect, for it lacks the positive/negative treatment categorization, and the degree of discussion, but the snippet of how the case was cited is nice.

In short, I think West and Lexis certainly have something to worry about, but Google still has some work to do. If you’re listening Google, improve your boolean connectors and limiters, and don’t force me to use your cool stemming technology; sometimes when I search for “behavior” I don’t want to be returned results including “behave.”

As a Mac user, I’d like to see a similar tool for Firefox — or see Google finally release their Mac version of Chrome.

I’ve written an extension for Google Chrome that displays them inline, as star pagination. If you’re using Chrome, and have enabled extensions, you can use mine to display page numbers inline – http://links.lawstoreapp.com/stars

I had a chance to try out printing today. I tried three browsers: Firefox 3.5, Internet Explorer 7, and Safari 4. Two of them worked pretty well. The third… didn’t.

The browser that didn’t work for me was Firefox. I couldn’t see any page numbers after the first printed page, although they were fine on the screen. I’m not quite sure why Firefox’s printing engine messed this up — the page numbers seem to be using pretty standard web formatting (CSS) behind the scenes.

Google could fix this by having a “print” button that returned a PDF or something pre-formatted. Or I suppose someone could come up with a Firefox plugin to try to do the work. In the meantime, this is bad news for Firefox users who like to print their cases out onto paper.

No, this tool isn’t smart about statutory citations (at least not yet). The statutes and rules are not hyperlinked. Also, the search box doesn’t yet know that “Tex. R. Civ. P.” is the same as “Texas Rule of Civil Procedure.”

At least in Texas, there are good ways to get the text of statutes and (most) rules online from the horse’s mouth, so to speak. I tend to go directly to the Legislature’s website to find statutory language. Their format is not perfect, but it’s easier for me to work with than the way the paid publishers dice up the statutes.

The cases I have worked with show a page number in the left-hand margin corresponding to the reporter page breaks.

I’m told that this is very close to accurate — there might be times where it’s off by a few words. If your quote starts or stops exactly on that line, you might need more precision.

Are you seeing something different on the cases you’ve looked at?