April 2, 1973 — The First Search Engine: Lexis
April 2, 1973
Lexis (LexisNexis) — the first search engine for legal information and one of the first search systems in history. This system allowed users to search for information about laws, court decisions, and other related documents.
Lexis was officially presented on April 2, 1973 in New York, USA.
A useful tool for lawyers
Searching for information using a computer greatly speeds up the work of lawyers, just like for any other profession. But for lawyers in the United States, the topic of information search is especially relevant because of the specifics of the precedent-based legal system.
In the United States, a system of precedent law operates — law is formed not only by statutes, but also by court decisions. This means that lawyers can use decisions made in similar cases earlier as precedent, and this can influence the decision in their own case. Within this type of work, it is necessary to know not only the laws but also the histories and decisions of specific cases, and this is an enormous flow of information.
Computer-based search was extremely useful in this situation. Instead of manual search through complicated printed collections of cases, Lexis provided the ability to write a text query and obtain information about cases that had already happened. The user composed a text query with a special syntax and received large sets of data. This principle is similar to today’s work with database management systems.
How did it work?
Lexis was a desktop terminal that connected through the telephone network to a mainframe, which were located in different centers across the country. These mainframes received queries from users and, just like modern servers, returned the response to the terminal that sent the request.
IBM mainframes were used as the central computers. These were giant machines that occupied enormous rooms. In the first version of the project, the data used for searching was stored on magnetic tapes.
Naturally, the speed of information search was thousands of times slower than today’s search engines, but even such a slow search was hundreds of times faster than a manual search through paper materials.
How much did it cost?
Lexis was one of the first search engines. Many search technologies and approaches were used there for the first time in history. There was no Internet, and the cost of storing and processing a single bit was billions of times higher than today. The RAM of those mainframes was only a few megabytes.
Taking all this into account, the cost of usage varied from $100 to several hundred dollars per hour. The cost was charged for the time of use and for the specific databases that the system accessed during the search.
The workflow with Lexis looked like this:
- write a query on paper that will be sent to Lexis
- have the query checked by several specialists
- connect to Lexis and enter the query as quickly as possible so as not to waste time
And even with all these difficulties, using Lexis was still more profitable for organizations than manual search through paper sources. In other words, the product was economically beneficial — and this was the key to its success.
Nexis
Later in 1979, the Mead company (the creator of Lexis) introduced another product — Nexis. This was also a search engine, but it focused on:
- news and business databases
- public records and corporate data
After some time, both brands were combined into LexisNexis, and to this day, the product provides information search services under this name.