OR
Use OR to search for documents that contain either search term. For example:
negligent OR malicious
will search for documents which contain either the word “negligent” or the word “malicious”.

AND (also +)
The AND operator matches documents that contain all of search terms anywhere in the document. To search for documents that contain both the word “malicious” and the word “knowing” you could search for
malicious AND knowing
You connect many search terms with the operators AND and OR.

NOT (also -)
The NOT operator excludes documents that contain the search term after the NOT (or – symbol). To search for documents that contain the word “malicious” but do not contain the word “negligent”, for example, you could search for
malicious NOT negligent

Grouping
A very useful feature of Lucene (the computer language which supports our Boolean search facility) is that it supports grouping search terms into sub-queries using parentheses. So one could search for
(reckless OR malicious) AND homicide
If you wanted to find documents in which “homicide” occurred, and either the word “reckless” or the word “malicious” also appeared.

Phrasal
This feature allows you to search for phrases such as “presidential powers”. You denote a phrase by enclosing it with in quotation marks, such as
“presidential powers”
If you put a phrase inside of quotation marks, the search engine will look for documents with that phrase in it (EXACT MATCH).

Proximity Search
This feature allows to search words within a specific distance away. To do a proximity search use the tilde, "~", symbol at the end of a phrase.
For example to search for "presidential" and "powers" within 10 words of each other in a document use the search:
"presidential powers"~10

Fuzzy Searches
This feature allows fuzzy searches based on the Levenshtein Distance, or Edit Distance algorithm. It means that our search engine will also find words which are similar to the user query. To do a fuzzy search use the tilde, "~", symbol at the end of a Single word Term. For example to search for a term similar in spelling to "power" use the fuzzy search:
power~
This search will find terms like powers and powered.
You can set an additional (optional) parameter to specify the required similarity. The value is between 0 and 1, with a value closer to 1 only terms with a higher similarity will be matched. For example:
power~0.8
will find word with at least 80% of the letters equal to power
The default that is used if the parameter is not given is 0.5.

Wildcard Searches
PreCYdent search engine supports single and multiple character wildcard searches within single terms (not within phrase queries).
To perform a single character wildcard search use the "?" symbol.
To perform a multiple character wildcard search use the "*" symbol.
The single character wildcard search looks for terms that match that with the single character replaced. For example, to search for "text" or "test" you can use the search:
te?t
Multiple character wildcard searches looks for 0 or more characters. For example, to search for test, tests or tester, you can use the search:
test*
You can also use the wildcard searches in the middle of a term.
te*t
Note: You cannot use a * or ? symbol as the first character of a search.

PreCYdent makes a difference when your research needs to be thorough
The PreCYdent legal search engine is different from other legal research engines. It deploys a unique network-theory-based search technology, similar in some respects to that used by Google and other advanced search providers. This means we can return to you cases that are legally related to your query, even though the words of your query do not actually occur in them or do not occur frequently. If you want to see only cases in which your search query terms do actually occur, check the box next to the text

Show only results containing search terms

Lawyers and others who wish to make sure they cover all possibly relevant cases in their research may wish to use PreCYdent without checking the above option. Because the leading fee-based online legal research services do not deploy our patent-pending technology, their search engines (to the best of our knowledge) will not return cases if the search terms do not actually occur in them. Even lawyers with access to potentially expensive fee-based services thus may wish to supplement their research with PreCYdent, in matters where thoroughness of research is important. Of course, we cannot guarantee that our search engine will find all legally relevant authorities. But we can pick up cases other search engines may miss, because our technology is different, and in our view, more advanced.

US Supreme Court:
complete with official US citation and pagination since 1759

Federal Reporter 2nd edition:
complete with official citation and pagination from 1950

Federal Reporter 3rd edition:
complete with official citation and pagination until August 2006

All Federal Circuit Court of Appeals:
all the opinions, published and not published, released by the Federal Circuit Courts from august 2006 until today, constantly updated every 3 hours. We do not have the official reporter citation but it will be available soon. We have the official docket number assigned by the Court.
We should be able to provide official citations for opinions published after August 2006 by the end of April 2008.

Federal District Courts:
Federal District Opinions since 2004. Updated every month. It does NOT contain the following district courts:

• Canal Zone District court
• Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court
• Guam District Court
• Illinois Central District Court
• Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation
• Northern Mariana Islands District Court
• Virgin Islands District Court

The Federal District Court database is not completed, it is very partial because not all the Federal District Courts publish their opinions online.
We cannot assure the completeness of the federal district court database

States Courts:
We contain all the cases, published and not published, released by the following Courts and starting from the reported date:

• Alaska Supreme Court since September 2007
• Alaska Court of Appeals since November 2007
• Arizona Supreme Court since February 1998
• Arizona Court of Appeals since January 2008
• Arkansas Supreme Court since January 1996
• Arkansas Court of Appeals since January 1996
• California Supreme Court since January 2000
• California Court of Appeals since January 2000
• Delaware Supreme Court since January 2000
• Delaware Superior Court since January 2002
• Delaware Court of Chancery since January 2000
• District of Columbia Court of Appeals since August 1998
• Florida Supreme Court since January 1986
• Florida Court of Appeals since May 2001
• Georgia Supreme Court since January 2006
• Hawaii Supreme Court since January 1998
• Hawaii Intermediate Court of Appeals since January 1998
• Idaho Supreme Court since January 2007
• Idaho Court of Appeals since May 2006
• Illinois Supreme Court since May 1996
• Illinois Court of Appeals since September 1996
• Indiana Supreme Court since March 1998
• Indiana Court of Appeals since January 1997
• Iowa Supreme Court since May 1998
• Iowa Court of Appeals since January 1998
• Maryland Court of Appeals since March 1995
• Maryland Court of Special Appeals since January 1995
• Massachusetts Supreme Court since January 1999
• Massachussetts Court of Appeals since January 1999
• Michigan Supreme Court since January 2001
• Michigan Court of Appeals since April 1996
• Minnesota Supreme Court since May 1996
• Minnesota Court of Appeals since May 1996
• Mississipi Supreme Court, dic 1999
• Mississipi Court of Appeals, dic 1999
• Missouri Supreme Court since March 1997
• Missouri Court of Appeals since May 1997
• Nevada Supreme Court since January 2008
• New Hampshire Supreme Court since November 1995
• New Jersey Supreme Court since January 1994
• New Jersey Court of Appeals since April 1994
• New York Court of Appeals since January 1992
• North Carolina Supreme Court since February 1997
• North Carolina Court of Appeals since Janaury 1996
• North Dakota Supreme Court since January 1966
• Oklahoma Supreme Court since April 1890
• Oklahoma Court of Civil Appeals since October 1968
• Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals since January 1900
• Ohio Supreme Court since May 1992
• Ohio Court of Appeals since April 1999
• Oregon Supreme Court since January 1998
• Oregon Court of Appeals since January 1998
• Pennsylvania Supreme Court since September 1998
• Pennsylvania Superiour Court since September 1998
• Pennsylvania Commonwelth Court since August 1998
• Rhode Island Supreme Court since September 1999
• South Dakota Supreme Court since January 1996
• Tennessee Supreme Court since January 1998
• Tennessee Court of Appeals since January 1986
• Tennessee Court of Criminal Appeals since April 1997
• Texas Supreme Court since January 2003
• Texas Court of Criminal Appeals since October 2003
• Utah Supreme Court since January 1997
• Utah Court of Appeals since January 1997
• Vermont Supreme Court since May 1993
• Virginia Supreme Court since June 1995
• Virginia Court of Appeals since May 1995
• Washington Supreme Court since June 1939
• Washington Court of Appeals since September 1969
• West Virginia Supreme Court since July 1997
• Wisconsin Supreme Court since October 1995
• Wisconsin Court of Appeals since January 1996
• Wyoming Supreme Court since January 1980

We cannot assure the completeness of the States database.
We do not have the official citation and pagination, but the official docket number released by the Court.
We are working to warrant the completeness and to assign the official code by April 2008.