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	What's new in the new AustLII?
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The redesign is a result of the AustLII User Survey run in 1998 and our first Usability Study, run in 1999. We've also collected comments sent to feedback over the years and performed some detailed analysis of how people use AustLII.

Here are some of the things we've been working on:

• New Search Interface
  We've revamped our search engine. The new interface should be more familiar to users of general web search engines. It uses the "any of the words", "all of the words", "this phrase" style of searching. "Freeform" is gone. If you want to use boolean searching, be sure to select "this Boolean phrase" in the Find list.

  The new search engine also reports individual word counts, suspected mis-spellings and common (ignored) words. The number of common words has been greatly reduced due to new "split virtual concordance" technology.

  The front page search form has a few more options. The Full Search Form allows you to chose individual databases, and easily search combinations of databases (eg search High Court and Federal Court cases at the same time). Relevance ranking is on by default. Legislation name searching is much faster. In fact, search performance generally has improved (some areas seeing a 10 times performance improvement).

• World Law
  AustLII's World Law has been greatly expanded. You can now do a "full text" search of the world's best legal sites from AustLII (like an "Alta Vista" that contains nothing but legal information). Searches are limited to the category that you are viewing.

• Help Section
  We've overhauled and updated the online help. Recommended reading. Really. You'll find context sensitive help available on most pages.

• New Feedback System
  We tend to get overwhelmed with feedback mail and lose track of outstanding issues and user complaints or queries. The number of staff has also risen to a level that's difficult to co-ordinate using an e-mail only feedback mechanism. So we've invented a web-based Feedback System for users to contact us, that allows us to track who's answered what and what issues are still outstanding.

• Site Overhaul
  There have been many cosmetic changes. We've kept the graphics to a minimum, and once they're in your cache you should fly along quite nicely. The new layout requires HTML 3.2 and relies on tables in many areas (but not for primary materials). Older browsers or those that don't support tables should still be able to get around however -- we've tested with Lynx to make sure pages still look good.

  Incidentally, this means that the locations of some files have changed for the first time in 3 years (a long time on the web). However our error handling scripts should automatically take you to the new locations -- you might not even notice. But if you do find some things missing, please report them to feedback.

• And lots of "backend" stuff
  AustLII has been working on a number of "backend" issues to (among other things): reduce the number of common words to a minimum; reduce the time lag between new cases being listed and then appearing in search results; manage the 1.5 million legal documents on AustLII and the several thousand remote sites that are indexed in World Law; and much more...