With about six billion pages on the indexed or surface web and the answers to so many of our questions readily available via the most commonly used internet browsers, it’s easy to forget that over 99% of the internet isn’t indexed, hidden in the deep web from casual internet users. Further, Google only indexes about four percent of the internet and the other tip-of-your-tongue browsers like Bing, Yahoo, and Ask cover far less. Here’s a look at a few alternative legal research search engines and browsers that will help you access some of the web sources that might otherwise not crop up in your search results:
DuckDuckGo is the go-to for privacy and anonymized searches. It’s not as expansive in its coverage as Google, but its clean, familiar layout and private search history makes it critically necessary for sensitive, confidential searches and in response to concerns about privacy.
The Internet Archive or Wayback Machine preserves webpages by crawling and capturing sites. It is very helpful when you need to see a site that has been deleted or a page that has been changed. It doesn’t capture every site every day but its value is immeasurable.
Pipl is a useful legal research tool for people finding / people search, especially if you don’t have access to a mainstream, proprietary public records resource. Unfortunately, it’s no longer free but businesses might consider it.
Google Scholar, familiar to attorneys, students, and anyone looking for research papers, scholarly articles, and other academic resources that seem out of reach if you don’t work in academe, will point you to full text or a library that holds the item.
WolframAlpha is all about facts and data. Its strength is computational intelligence. If you need calculations, estimates, or data retrieval, use it.
The Tor browser offers privacy and encryption to users, using decentralized routing, as well as access to websites that are often blocked from users in certain settings and countries via firewalls.
If we keep in mind that a lot of the internet is out of view, we’ll be more savvy and productive legal researchers and information professionals by using nonstandard search engines and browsers for both legal research and general research when scratching the surface just isn’t good enough.
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