A few weeks ago, we made a fairly major change at CourtListener.com to include ID numbers in all of our case URLs. This change meant that links that were previously like this:
http://courtlistener.com/scotus/Wong-v.-Smith/
Are now like this:
http://courtlistener.com/scotus/V5o/wong-v-smith/
Most of the old links should continue to work, but using the new links should be much faster and more reliable. The major difference between the two is the ID number, which is encoded as a set of numbers (in this case V5o). This ID corresponds directly with the ID number in our database, aiding us greatly in serving up cases quickly and accurately.
Around the same time as this change, we added social networking links to all of our case pages to make them easier to share with friends and colleagues. These links use our new tiny domain, http://crt.li/, and should thus be ideal for websites like Twitter or Reddit.
In the next few months we will be getting a major new server, and will be migrating our data to it. This will allow us to serve more data, and—drum roll please—will allow us to begin serving audio content on the site. That's right, in the next few months, we will begin getting oral arguments from the circuit courts, and will be serving it directly to you on the case pages.
We also have plans to revisit our search interface in order to add date filtering and query building so look for that soon.
As always, we welcome your feedback and support, so don't hesitate to get in touch with us if you have any questions or suggestions.
If this change dramatically increased the site's article throughput rate, the title (or slug) column for articles was probably not indexed correctly.
Hm. Interesting. There were also some changes in the way the title was looked up on the backend, but as I recall, the field was indexed in the DB.
My understanding of how DBs work for this kind of thing is that in the old method, they have to do a b-tree search, which can take some time, whereas in the new method, they simply select a row.
I'm not a DB expert (yet), so I'd be happy to hear otherwise. If I'm wrong about this, I'd be surprised, since many of the sites on the Internet use fields exactly like this (see Google Cache, StackOverflow, and many others).
The other big benefit of this change is that the URL and the title of the case are no longer linked. So if a case has a typo in its name, that doesn't automatically get placed in the URL, where we can't fix it.
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