Arguably the pick of the offline crop in India. The new version of SCC Online’s Supreme Court Case Finder is faster, more accurate and has lots of bells and whistles thrown in.

It’s worth spending some time with this one. There’s a lot you can do with it — for example, you can use it to maintain a personal caselaw diary, adding annotations as you go along. These are searchable, too, and that makes this a pretty comprehensive package.

They’ve now added State reports (Bombay for one) and should be getting into the local Acts shortly. The updates are regular, too.

The major plus point with SCC Online is that the print-outs are tamper-proof and an exact facsimile reproduction of the printed page. That makes it impossible to do any kind of a global cut-and-paste but it vouches for the authenticity of the print-out when you use it.

The search is powerful and quick but they don’t use an algorithm that’s gained currency on the Web. Instead you have to remember their peculiar search syntax, something like this:

Legitimate NEAR expectations AND (hearing AND fair)

It’s impossible to remember all the permutations and combinations. A much simpler alternative might have been to follow the Google/Yahoo method with plus (+) and minus (-) signs and quote marks around phrases. This is now familiar to most users. Perhaps in time.