Planned Improvements for the next release

Here is a broad list of changes to Indian Kanoon that I am planning for the next release (hopefully out by July end 2014)

1. Remove duplicate judgment. Many high courts are like Uttarakhand, Jharkhand, Orissa and Bombay are publishing the same judgment on different URLs. Perhaps every case number has a new URL even when cases are combined together in a judgment.

2. Improve the judgment layout. It will involve removing page numbers and case numbers sprinkled in between the text. It will also involve improving the layout and paragraph detection algorithm.

3. Improve the pdf output. Currently IK uses htmldoc for generating pdf output. But it has limitations on the fonts we can use. So plan is to move to Pisa.

4. Add judgments from Consumer Courts at national and state levels. District consumer forums in Maharasthra, Gujarat and Karnataka are using local languages that are using custom embedded fonts in the PDF. As the text is not in unicode, it will require lot more effort to reverse engineer the fonts for any text processing. So district consumer courts will not be added.

5. Improve titles for Bombay, Kolkata, Andhra and Kerala high court. Since these courts do not provide meta information, the petitioner and extracted from the free text. Currently there are lot of error in these extractions and the plan is to improve them.

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.

Captcha on Patna high court website

To: hcpat-bih@nic.in

I am founder of a legal search engine called Indian Kanoon (http://indiankanoon.org)
Indian Kanoon provides state of art free search and free access to
Indian court judgments to the common people.

Indian Kanoon daily crawls different Indian court websites and adds the
set of updated judgments for Supreme court and high courts to its
database. Since court judgments do not have copyright protection,
Indian Kanoon does not violate any copyright law.

Infact Indian Kanoon provides just another portal for people to get access to
court judgments and thereby allows more widespread distribution of court
judgments. Restricting access to judgments in this particular fashion
will hinder Indian Kanoon ability to provide access to Patna High
Court decisions and thereby in people to have easy access to court
judgments. Currently Indian Kanoon serves more than 2 million users
every month.

Indian Kanoon fills in many voids which exist in current Indian court
websites. Restricting access to judgments also forces people to stay
with the court websites and force them to not use the law search tools
provided by other providers like Indian Kanoon. I think providing
unhindered access to court judgments is in the interest of Indian people
as they can use any research tools provided by any competitive portal.
If such restrictions are removed, people can choose whichever website
they like most.

If the problem was in Patna High Court server getting overload because of
Indian Kanoon crawling, I would like to state that Indian Kanoon crawls
the websit eonly once at 12:00 AM IST when there is little chance of
affecting any normal user on your website. Further, replicating court
judgments on Indian Kanoon reduces the load on Patna court servers
as many people can access the judgments directly on Indian Kanoon.

So I would kindly  request you to remove captcha restriction on Patna High
Court website.

Your's Sincerely,
Sushant.