Tuesday, June 24, 2014

Indian Kanoon: Search Within Results

Some of my lawyer friends have told me in past that they need a way to "Search Within Results". Consider an example where a person has filed a "child custody" case and he or she is an accused in a separate criminal trial of "attempt to murder". The lawyer wants to know whether the ongoing criminal trial will have a bearing on the "child custody" case or not. The lawyer searches for "child custody" and then want to only look on those cases that have "attempt to murder" in it. One easy way would be to just search for "child custody attempt to murder". But a search for entire phrase may not get you very relevant result because the phrases are disconnected. So it will be better if we can filter the documents by "custody of child" and then look for most relevant documents by the phrase "attempt to murder".

To support this use case, a new "filter" keyword is added. Now you can search for "attempt to murder"  in documents that have "custody of child" by the following search query: "attempt to murder filter: custody of child". In this case the ranking will only be decided by the phrase "attempt to murder" giving better results.

There is a new box provided at the bottom of the page titled "Search Within Results" that takes existing search as the "filter" and then uses new query to rank order the matching documents.