I was reading in the economist a few weeks back regarding search engines. When user user searches video, image or music files (basically any non-text file) all search engines at the moment can only search key words related to the files name. Currently a number of companies are in the development stage of creating a search appliciations which searche within the file such as words sung in a song or sentences said within a movie. Soon we may even see search engines which when you type for example beach they will return a picture containing images from a beach....more to come... (Adam shell)
This Question needs to be answered with respect to each of the things that one would search for on the internet using a search engine.
Legislation
With free-access services such as Austlii and also government websites providing legislation online, provided that such information is not blocked by denying access to web spiders, then accessibility to such primary material will remain relatively easy. So the answer to the above question with respect to Legislation appears to be yes.
Cases
Cases still pose difficulties. Annotated Cases are only provided by Commercial publishers. It is unlikely that such a feature would be built into free access sites like Austlii due to the resource requirements of such an editorial task. However, the vast number of cases provided through Austlii for Australian Cases and the proliferation of its equivalent sites around the world mean that significant cases are available freely. This however in itself, means little for legal research via search engines for caselaw. One would need either the blocking of web spiders to be removed or hits for a search on another part of a particular homepage, from which one could navigate easily to the case’s judgment.
Journal Articles
With the development of Google Scholar as mentioned on the previous page, accessibity to a global resource of articles has been unleashed. One can hope that such a service becomes more and more comprehensive, that more articles hopefully become free access enabling the spreading of more knowledge worldwide and the stimulation of critical thought.
In light of the foregoing, it would appear that increasingly significant amounts of research may be able to be performed via search engines. However, “All research” appears somewhat unrealistic. As such, the traditional methods of legal research will retain their contextual importance.