Introduction

Indlaw.com - India's Premium Online Research Service offers you the most intuitive and advanced Legislation and Rules research solutions.

The following guide has been provided to assist you step by step to make the best of this highly advanced search facility. Through this, you can learn to retrieve legislation information in different ways suiting your research needs. And find out easy ways to research comprehensively on a particular law of importance to you. This guide further explains how to choose between the various search tools within this database so that you find the most relevant information quickly.

Three Intuitive Legislation Search Tools

To enable you to have more control over your search for relevant sections or rules, or to alternatively search for words or concepts, Indlaw offers you 3 possible search formats to search within the legislation database, viz..

1. Legislation Search (by Title) - (Use this search in case you know the short title or full title of the legislation.)

2. Advanced Search - (Use this search to narrow down your search for legislation on the basis of any of the following parameters, viz., Title, Act no, Year of promulgation, date of promulgation, legislative body, keywords, concepts, law, industry or state.)

3. Free Text Search - (Use this search to find out the statistically most relevant legislation using keywords or concepts.)

Search Tool 1 - Legislation Search

Search by Short Title / Title
To search for a Legislation enter the long title / short title of the legislation or a keyword in the legislation to narrow your search for that specific legislation.

Eg. If you are searching for the legislation relating to arbitration, all you need to do is enter the word "arbitration" in the relevant box of the Legislation Title field.

Just click on the most relevant legislation on the Results Page to read the Legislation text.

Search Tool 2 - Free Text Search


Free Text or Natural Language Search

The Indlaw Free Text Legislation Search allows you to search for legislation using phrases, concepts or principles to retrieve the most statistically relevant legislation from our legislation database. Simply type the principle / concept / word and click GO. Indlaw will display the legislation that most closely matches the concepts in your description.

Eg. If you wish to retrieve legislations relating to copyright, all you have to do is enter the word "copyright" in the Search field of the "Free Text Search - Legislation" to retrieve the most relevant legislation.

Depending on what you wish to search, you can further refine your search for the most relevant legislation, by clicking on the link to the legislation that links higher or by clicking the more appropriate link.

Refining your Free Text Search
Free text Search would often throw up multiple search results especially if search is being made on the basis of certain common words or phrases. To help you find the most relevant legislation containing the exact phrase, concept or keyword you have entered, Indlaw advises the use the Boolean operators.

The following Note gives you a brief idea as to how Boolean Operators, connectors and proximity operators operate. To learn more about them, click here

If you want more than one phrase or word to appear in the retrieved legislation, put an AND between them. For example, to find legislations containing the phrase "copyright act" as well as the word "patent act", type: Copyright Act AND Patent Actin the search field.

If, on the other hand, you want to find one term and / or another one, put an OR between them. For example, to find legislation which contain the words "copyright act" or "patent act" search for Copyright act OR Patent act.

Search Examples

1. copy* related words - copy, copyright, copying.

2. "crime" Search only for crime.

3. "crime AND conviction" the words crime and conviction, occurring together on the same page.

4. Crime conviction the words crime and conviction, occurring on the same page.

5. Commerce* All words beginning with commerce .

6. Commerce, transaction Any of the words Commerce, transaction. The more instances of these words in a page, the higher it appears in the result list.

For More detailed explanation of how to refine your search using Boolean search tips, Proximity connectors and Wildcards go to the Boolean Tips Section.

Search Tool 3 - Advanced Search


Search by Title
For search for a Legislation you have to enter the long title / short title of the legislation or a keyword in the legislation to narrow your search for that specific legislation. Just click on the most relevant legislation and continue the search.

Search by Act Number
In case you know the act number of a particular Legislation, this search is the one to go for. Type out the act number in the respective field in the Legislation Search section

Search by Act Year
When you know the act year of the legislation you wish to retrieve, type the act year in the respective "Act Year" field of the Search.

Search by Enacted By
Indlaw publishes Legislation notified by in pre- independence period(Imperial Statutes), the pre-parliament period(Dominion Statutes) and the post Parliament period. Statutes gazetted by various State Governments and Delegated Legislation are also published on Indlaw. In case you wish to refine your search for the most appropriate Legislation enacted by a particular legislature this field is the one to use in the Legislation Search section.

Eg. To search for parliamentary enactments just enter "parliament" in the " Enacted by" field. To search by state enactments enter the state concerned in the "Enacted by" field.

Search by Date of Promulgation
To search for Legislation on the basis of their date of promulgation, use this field in the Legislation Search Section.

Search by Laws
This field is used to restrict the search to a restricted number of Indlaw's proprietary databases or a specific database. To see a complete list of Indlaw databases click here.

Search by Industry
This field is used to restrict the search to specific industries, sectors or products. And it enables you to search for industries', sectors' or product specific legislation information from specific database. Our databases cover over 6000 industries, sectors and products.

Eg. Enter "computer" in the "Industry" field to get all the legislations which may be relevant to the computer industry.

Search by State
This field is used to restrict the search to state specific databases. To see a complete list of Indlaw State databases click here.

Reviewing Results


Search Engine Results by Relevance and Date

Search queries will return results, ranked by relevance and date. When reviewing your results, consider the following elements:

1) The user would need to restrict his search results to specific database to further retrieve the searches he has looked up.

2) The search engine calculates percentage relevance. Higher percentages indicate a higher occurrence or a closer relevance to your search. Results are displayed in descending order of relevance or occurrence of the word searched.

3) The Search results are also sorted on the basis of date.

4) In the Search Results Page, there would be a linked Legislation Title which on clicking would lead to the relevant legislation. The Title of the Legislation would provide the context in which to evaluate the result Title and Summary.

If you determine that all results of interest to you ought to be from a particular database, ( For eg., - Intellectual Property Database) then you can limit your search to that database and further refine your search in the area of interest using "Search within Search" function.

Printing or emailing results


Click the "Print this page" button to print a hard copy of the Legislation.

Click the "Mail this page" button to email the Legislation link.