Here is a review of the major search engines, focusing specifically on legal research.
Simple searches are accurate and complex searches can create extremely sophisticated searches.
Simple searches are entered on a single-line form. Alta Vista searches each word individually, and orders sites by the number of hits, first ordering sites which contain hits on all words and ordering within that group by the number of times the keywords appear. Alta Vista shows the number of hits obtained for each keyword, so the searcher can decide which keywords are useful and which are so common that the words are of no use in limiting the search. Each site is identified with a hypertext link, the URL, the first few lines of the site's text, the file size, and the date on which the site was most recently indexed into the Alta Vista database. A lawyer planning to use Alta Vista's advanced search capabilities should take the time to become familiar with the advanced search engine's logic.