"Easy Search" Debuts on Lexis

LexisNexis has just rolled out "Easy Search," a third search method that complements the two other search methods, "Terms and Connectors" and "Natural Language."

Lexis tells us that Easy Search is optimized for searches of just a couple of words, and that it will return results ranked in order of relevance.  By contrast, Natural Language searching is optimized for searches in the form of plain English questions, and Terms and Connectors expects the researcher to use full-on Boolean searching, complete with  AND, OR and so-called "proximity" connectors.

To illustrate:  For an issue involving school prayer at graduations, searches of each type might look something like:

[Easy Search]

school prayer graduation

[Natural Language]

are prayers permitted at public school graduations

[Terms and Connectors]

pray! or benediction or invocation w/p school w/p graduat! or commencement

You can use Easy Search by picking a source and then clicking the Easy Search button in the "Enter Search Terms" box. And should you forget yourself and accidentally enter a Terms and Connectors search, Lexis will run it without complaint and rank your results by relevance—giving you the best of both worlds.

There's more information on each search style on the Searching the LexisNexis Research Services page.

Comments

[C. C. Langdell]

I think this is great, it is sure to appeal to the Google crowd and it is nice for the Terms and Connector jockeys to have an easy way to get relevance ranking. But one of the biggest problems with Lexis still remains; which of the 30,000 databases do you search? Navigating and selecting databases remains a daunting task. Let's see what Lexis R&D can do to improve this.