What this search cannot do, and the figures behind it
Every search on this site shows a short list of what it cannot do. This page is the evidence behind that list: the counts, the dates they were measured, and how they were measured. The text in each grey box below is fetched live from the search service right now and printed word for word, so what you read here is what the service is actually saying.
The short version
- This misses cases, including ones that would help you. It searches a stored copy of a public collection, not everything a court has decided.
- The case law stops on 31 March 2026. Nothing decided after that date is in this collection, so a thin or empty result about anything recent means the collection ends there, not that no such case exists. Check the last several months elsewhere.
- This cannot tell you whether a case is still good law. Nothing here checks whether a case was overruled, limited, or reversed.
- Keywords are not concepts. “petition” will not match “petitions”, and a case that makes your argument in different words will not appear in a word search.
- Concept search ranks part of the collection, not all of it. More than one opinion in six was never added to the concept index and cannot appear in a concept ranking at any position, for any search.
- Some opinions that look covered by concept search were added from a short caption only, so their actual reasoning is not being matched.
- Some records hold little or no stored opinion text, so a word search cannot find them by what they say.
- The figures below have been corrected four times, twice up and twice down. Treat any single count of this gap as unverified.
- When part of a search fails, the page says so and shows no results. A failed search is never presented as a search that found nothing.
The measured text, live from the search service
Loading the current text…
Word search
Matches the exact words you type in the stored opinion text, ranked by textual relevance.
Concept search
Ranks opinions whose meaning is close to what you describe, over the part of the collection that has been added to the concept index.
Merged search
Runs the word search and the concept search and combines the two ranked lists.
Case-name and citation search
Searching by case name or citation looks records up directly and does no ranking, so the concept-index gaps above do not apply to it. The first two lines in the short version still do. It searches a stored copy of a public collection, and it says nothing about whether a case is still good law. A citation that was never loaded here will not be found here, even though the case exists in the court’s own records.
Citation references between cases
Where this site shows cases that cite an opinion, or cases an opinion cites, that is a textual reference only: one opinion’s text names the other. It is not agreement, approval, treatment, validity, or a good-law check. It is also a bounded sample of a partial collection, so references to cases that were never loaded here are counted but not listed.
How the figures were corrected
The counts above have been revised four times, twice upward and twice downward. Each superseded figure, and what was wrong with it, is kept word for word in the project repository at docs/glo-coverage-note-history.md. They are kept rather than quietly replaced because a number that has moved four times should not be read as settled.