You can now chose from at least two specialized legal market search engines.
Quest from law.com has been around a while. I’ve been disappointed in my occasional use of it so, inspired by Bob Ambrogi’s article Tour the Legal Web’s New Sites, decided to look quickly at the more recently released Lexis Web.
One of my favorite topics is “e-discovery concept search”. Using that string in Lexis Web, one of my blog posts is the first hit (ego surfing was not my goal!). Other hits on the first page are from a range of sources. In contrast, the Quest search yields hits only from law.com publications on the first page, even though I selected the “Legal Web” rather than “Law.com Network” option. I also find the Lexis Web interface much cleaner. Using “knowledge management” as the string yielded similar results.
A substantive legal topic in the news this year was “medical device preemption”. Using that string, I was surprised neither search engine yielded an obvious first page hit about the February Supreme Court decision on the topic, Riegel.
My quick tests are not systematic much less scientific. But my conclusion after 30 minutes is that anyone who wants to rely on either needs to invest some time to figure out exactly how each works. I supposed this post has now become self-referential because it is about concept searching.