Ted Tjaden reported on Slaw this week that he updated his Custom Google Search of Canadian Law Firms, and plans to compare it to another search engine that crawls the sites of law firms, Fee Fie Foe Firm Canada. To help get the conversation started, here’s a brief comparison of these two search tools and a third that also allows an aggregated search over selected Canadian law firm websites, Lexology.

To test out the three tools, I ran three searches on each. I looked for articles discussing:

• the 2008 Supreme Court of Canada decision in Keays v. Honda Canada Inc., which clarified the nature of damages that can be awarded on the termination of employment
• the new British Columbia civil rules of court, scheduled to come into force in July 2010
• the Apology Act, which came into force in Ontario in April 2009, following the lead of several other provinces, including British Columbia in 2006

Coverage

Both Custom Google Search of Canadian Law Firms and Fee Fie Foe Firm Canada are powered by Google Custom Search, which allows a user to search over multiple websites handpicked by the site owner. The results listings offer a Google-like experience, although they can be customized somewhat. Lexology, meanwhile, aggregates law firm publications in a central repository.

Fee Fie Foe Firm Canada offers the widest coverage by a large margin. It crawls over 1500 Canadian law firm websites, compared to 51 for Custom Google Search of Canadian Law Firms. Lexology aggregates publications from approximately 25 Canadian law firms. This difference in coverage was noticeable in all three searches. Looking for analysis of the new court rules coming next year in BC, among the top results on Fee Fie Foe Firm Canada were several posts on the new rules on the ICBC Law Blog from Victoria lawyer Erik Magraken. This blog isn’t covered by the other two search tools. Like an increasing number of blogs, it has a separate URL from the main firm site. As more and more law firms offer specialized blogs to focus on specific topics and practice areas, an increasing amount of valuable content is being published away from the main firm website.

Search Experience

Fee Fie Foe Firm’s major weakness is the Google ads, three sets of them no less, one above the search results, another in the right column, and a banner ad at the bottom of the search results. The other two search tools are ad free, and offer cleaner search screens. The need to develop a revenue stream is completely understandable, but there’s a lot of screen real estate given over to the ads on Fee Fie Foe Firm.

In terms of returning relevant result sets, all three tools performed well. For the search for analysis of the SCC decision in Keays v. Honda Canada, all three search engines returned in the top five results such quality papers as this one, this one and this one. Lexicology had a slight edge, with consistently relevant results in the top five, although I suspect that had as much to do with its more carefully handpicked collection of articles than with its search tool’s relevancy formula.

Features

On features, Lexicology is certainly the strongest. You can filter searches by country, by topic, or by firm. Lexicology also offers a number of slick additional features, including the ability to build customized RSS feeds, to use sharing tools, and to link to related articles. In addition to its relatively limited coverage of Canadian firms, Lexicology’s main weakness is that you need to register to search at all (although registration is free).

As Canadian law firms publish more and more content to the web, tools that help us find this content will become more valuable. It's great to see specialized search tools like these ones show real promise.