“The word ‘search’ is a negative word. It fairly reeks of loss and effort” says James Whittaker, former Googler and technology executive, in his blog Why I Hate Search. Over the past few years, LexisNexis has had a huge focus on search and has been looking at ways to reduce the effort on the part of our users; specifically looking into how our users’ search behaviour has changed. Historically legal research was conducted by a few trained individuals in a law firm, searching through legal “databases”. All of the “search intelligence” resided in the user creating the Boolean queries that would return the best results.
Now our users are far higher in number, more demanding and they need the applications and content they use to be smarter. It is on us, not the user now, to make search as quick and as painless as possible – to get them the information and answers they need. To meet this challenge we have an ever-growing suite of tools and techniques that we use to add value.
