Legal Help Search Audit: Are Search Engines Effective Brokers of Legal Information?

Abstract

Online search engines are key providers of civic and legal information. Their response to people’s search queries can influence whether and how people make use of the legal system to deal with problems like evictions, domestic violence, debt collection, and natural disasters. This article proposes an audit protocol of how to evaluate how search engines respond to legal help queries. It summarizes the results of a preliminary audit of Google Search’s results for hundreds of people’s common queries around eviction, domestic violence, post-disaster scams, and debt collection lawsuits. This semi-automated analysis provides a quantitative understanding of how search engines provide information to people seeking legal help online. It also provides the data for robust qualitative analysis of the authority and quality of the results. Our initial audit finds that search engines are providing websites that offer generic information about a given legal problem, but often in ways that are not jurisdiction-relevant, nor with specific and actionable local information about how to make use of the legal aid or court system. The most common domains for legal help searches result in links to national commercial sites that offer short, high level articles about the problem area. Commercial, national websites consistently place higher than government, court, and legal aid websites. There are exceptions, particularly for domestic violence-related queries (which result in more national nonprofit and government websites) and for eviction-related queries that include specific reference to the person’s state or city (which result in more state-specific, nonprofit legal help websites). Of particular concern is the search engine’s apparent disregard for the importance of local jurisdictions for legal help information. In many instances, searches from North Florida and Hawaii about legal problems resulted in sites that offered local information from Maine, Oregon, Iowa, and California -- or from Australia, New Zealand, or the UK. Search engines have already addressed similar problems in civic information quality in other areas -- particularly in providing authoritative voting and public health information. Similar strategies may improve the current dysfunctions of legal help searches, to connect people with local, public, authoritative information that can help them resolve their issues around housing, domestic violence, natural disasters, debt, and beyond.