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This seems pretty good at first glance but there's significant room for improvement. Since this is HN, allow me to nitpick... - "630M" is a big number, sure, b
by airstrike 5y ago
This seems pretty good at first glance but there's significant room for improvement. Since this is HN, allow me to nitpick...
- "630M" is a big number, sure, but I don't have a sense for what % of total court cases it corresponds to. Is it closer to 10% or 90%? And either way, which ones are included vs. excluded? What was the criteria used? Accessibility, date, costs?
- I get the artistic view behind the choice of typography but the font is just too large. I find myself having to scroll to get just as far as the 5th result. Information density is good in search engines
- The results consist of two pieces: the name of the court (followed by "record", which is unnecessary) and a short snippet, but not the actual name of the case... which is an interesting choice given that the name of the case is stored in a database field as evidenced by the fact that it is in the <title> tag of any detail view
- Also I also think the snippets are too short. Together with the previous point, this site is basically forcing me to click on each potential match to see if it is what I wanted or not
- The URLs are... interesting. Searching for anything takes you to "https://www.judyrecords.com/getSearchResults/?page=1 https://www.judyrecords.com/getSearchResults/?page=1" which does not identify your search. Somehow this is using GET but not storing the form input in the URL but locally somehow... so searching for "foo" in one tab, "bar" in a different tab, and hitting refresh on your "foo" tab will then show "bar" results there. Which is not only "Not Cool", but seems actually harder to accomplish than a straight up form using GET
- And then the actual results have URLs like "https://www.judyrecords.com/record/qxemfajbcae3 https://www.judyrecords.com/record/qxemfajbcae3". I'd be fine with a slug, really, but in 2022 I expect URLs to be API-like
- I can't search for specific cases, e.g. "paramount communications, inc. v. qvc network, inc" returns a bunch of results, none of which are the actual case I'm looking for which is a hugely influential precedent
- richardbarosky 5y agoValid criticisms, thanks for pointing them out as areas of improvement. Good question about the % of total cases though I think there are some estimates on that. My guess would maybe be 100M+ cases per year.
- Hammershaft 5y ago> My guess would maybe be 100M+ cases per year. If this is close then that blows my mind. That would be roughly 1 court case per ~2.5 american adults per year.
- richardbarosky 5y agoI think it depends on how narrow you define what a court case is. The number doesn't seem too high if you factor in traffic cases. But you're probably right on a narrower definition, that would be too high.
- ALittleLight 5y agoSome random searches I did showed it does include at least some traffic cases. I saw one for speeding and another for texting while driving.
- ghaff 5y agoI note that this isn't just court cases. I have a long ago (paid) traffic ticket in there--well, not the ticket but a record pointing to a no longer existing ticket. (Maybe that's technically a court case though.) Something I wrote is also in a footnote to a patent filing.
- paulnpace 5y agoWhenever I see stuff from lawyers especially stuff with litigation, seems like the font size, typeface, and white space always punch me in the eye it's so gruesome.