General
Utilising Search engines for the purpose of legal research still requires keeping in mind general concepts that apply to any search engine. Sufficient knowledge of terms and connectors particular to a search engine, as well as using terms that are related to the topic or specific material of interest is necessary.
For further discussion, see:
Legislation
If there is a particular statute and section you are seek(eg s18 Crimes Act), then using the Google search engine as a tool, it was found that the search engine brought up the link straight on the Austlii website and slightly lower ranked ComLaw website.
Cases
Cases are freely accessible on sites like Austlii as well as recently released cases on Court websites such as NSW Lawlink Site.
However, using a search engine to simply input a concise case name and hoping it will come up might be difficult. When entering in a case name like “He Kaw Teh” it was noticed that there was no hit linking directly to where it was sorted on the Austlii site. This reflects the notion that for cases, the web spiders used by search engines to index pages and their content are blocked.
That is not to say one cannot access cases via search engines, there are other hits that come up which would provide a link to other sites that would eventually lead you to the case on a particular site. For example, when the above search term was entered, there were hits that linked directly to articles on Austlii, so one coul dsimply proceed to the home page and search the site internally. As a sidepoint, Austlii does have the function to utilise Google for its own search purposes, such as the “Law on Google” searches.
Journal Articles
Again limited journal articles are available on Austlii. Like legislation and unlike cases however, these articles do come up as hits when you use a search engine. Also if there are any electronic versions of articles stored on websites such as journal websites(see for example: Journal for Information Technology and Law, then search engines such as Google do usually have hits from them. In particular, Google now has a service specifically for searching for academic articles, both free access as well as pay to download called Google Scholar. One can generate significant hits for a particular author, for a title and where it has been cited which is a very time efficient tool.