Some valuable multi-country law indexes for specific subjects do exist on web sites specialising in a particular legal subject. The problem for the researcher is how to find such specialised subject indices without knowing the address of the site on which they are located to start with. Intellectual indexes are inherently hard to maintain As the quantity of legal material on the Internet grows, the sites that contain significant legal information grow so numerous, and some of sites are so large, that it is difficult to maintain intellectual indexes, at least with any depth of indexing of each site. For example, it soon becomes impossible to include in an intellectual index the content of each piece of legislation, each case, or each journal article included on a large site. To index large sites in any depth is expensive, as an individual indexer will add no more than a few entries per hour to a hypertext index, and that is assuming that there is almost no searching involved in finding what to add.
Intellectual indexes are therefore inherently shallow, and expensive to develop and maintain.
The challenge is to find what level of depth in Internet indexing is both maintainable and useful. In particular, they do not provide substantial coverage of available legislation, with one exception. Although some very good indices do exist for a limited number of particular countries, they are often difficult to find from the multi-country indices, and it is therefore difficult to find a good starting point for research unless you are aware beforehand where a good index for a country may be found.