good search engine is a lawyer’s most useful Internet tool. While the reigning best of breed is Google, www.google.com, a handful of upstarts are laying claim to the throne.

Sheer breadth is a major factor in Google’s search superiority. It is home to the largest Web archive by far, indexing more than three billion Web documents. Its closest competitor in size claims barely half that many. To search this many documents by hand, Google points out, would take nearly 6,000 years.