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: Out of the Jungle

Xyggy?

Rich Leiter twittered Xyggy legal, a new beta search engine for finding similar cases on the web. Xyggy offers more than just general legal searches, so you can reach Xyggy Patent, which covers patents from 1976 onwards. Xyggy Articles searches through archived news articles of the New York Times from 1987 - 2007.

Xyggy Legal covers:
Supreme Court decisions in US. Reports volumes 1 - 544,
Federal Circuit Courts of Appeal in F.2d, volumes 178 - 999, and F.3d vol. 1 - 491
They state that they are in beta, and that they hope to complete the currently spotty coverage of recent years as they go along.

Xyggy's home page explains the Item search as follows

the fundamental idea:

Xyggy?s paradigm for search is based on the fundamental idea that search should be item-based not just text-based
In everyday life, we constantly search for and find things (items). Xyggy is bringing item search to our digital lives.

What are items?
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.

What is item search?
Finding items with a query of one or more items.

The difference
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.

Why query with one or more items?
A query with more than one item allows Xyggy to discover what the query items have in common and returns better results.

I believe they are searching not only the text but also the metadata. They have carefully selected a few databases that are made available by the government. They have also purchased a dataset from the New York Times. All three already have metadata added. Xyggy searches these in addition to the full text of the documents. This is a very interesting development. I will be interested in testing what the engine can do and will be interested in hearing back from other librarians and other users. What an interesting way to advance! We have Google Scholar's legal button and now Xyggy! Xyggy Legal went live with a demo on November 16!

The decoration is the comic strip character Ziggy, by Tom Wilson. Tip of the OOTJ hat to Rich Leiter!

Full post as published by Out of the Jungle on November 22, 2009 (boomark / email).