Something new from Australia in the world of legal search and legal information… at long last and very exciting .
Qudoc is a new experimental search engine for Australian lawyers developed in Sydney.
They tell us that currently? At the moment it’s geared slightly more towards lawyers and? has a tendency to find in-depth legal information.
Here’s the press release.
Qudoc uses purpose-built algorithms to search the internet and automatically retrieve only web pages which are talking about Australian law. It has the ability to look at a website and determine which pages are talking about law and which ones aren’t.
Only the ones talking about law are indexed by Qudoc. So, when you search Qudoc you get the law, and only the law, without any irrelevant content!
Once Qudoc has identified an Australian law web page, it automatically filters it according to various categories such as subject, jurisdiction and so on. It uses another set of purpose-built algorithms to show citations between documents.
Qudoc is unique amongst legal information platforms in that we use algorithms,
Kieran Morgan the company’s director has told us that? .. It uses an automatic algorithm to scrape and separate Australian law from the internet, then categorise it according to subject, jurisdiction, what it cites / is cited by and so on.
and adds
I have to stress this is in beta mode, we’re still ironing a few bugs out!
This is a great development. We had hoped that Austlii would have been working on a product like this? and in a small market like Australia we’d have thought that LN or Westlaw might have considered investigating this approach. HOB looks forward to the further development and growth of Quodoc?
