dicate whether the site really is regularly checked and maintained- Apart from that, the accuracy of material can now more easily be verified through e-mail correspondence, fax or telephone directly with the publishe 4. How to search legal material on the internet The golden rule in comparative law- just behave as the natives do-applies equally to research on the Internet. If the research is not to be left to pure chance, one has to know in advance where one could be successful. This requires at least a certain familiarity with the information structure within the foreign system. For simple research, it generally does not make sense to become a customer of a commercial service such as WESTLAW, LEXIS, JURIS or CELEX. Therefore, the knowledge of how to use freely available sites is crucial 4. 1 Search engines Just as for general research on the Internet, search engines allow one to scan the Internet for relevant information on law. Large search engines such as altavista or Hotbot use small programs called robots or bots which crawl ceaselessly through the Www. Search engines create a file of every page they visit and, in this way, compile huge databanks with keywords. Despite their enormous size and capacity, even the most powerful engines register only about 16 to 20% of all WWW-pages(of approximately more than 800, 000, 000 today). Depending on the preciseness of the searchers keywords, the result of the search can either lead to accurate and comprehensive references of the available material or a jumbled list of irrelevant links. To gain an idea of how to use general search engines there are useful manuals such as How to Search the wWW: A Tutorial for Beginners and Non-Experts 2m Legal search engines enable the user to limit the search to some or all legal servers and, therefore, the searches are likely to result in more relevant references. FindLaw's Law Crawler (28) or the LawRunner global Index, a feature of the Internet Legal Resource Guide, are examples of multi-national legal search engines, while Der Fahnder- allows searches on German legal servers onl 4.2 Legal indicesindicate whether the site really is regularly checked and maintained(23) . Apart from that, the accuracy of material can now more easily be verified through e-mail correspondence, fax or telephone directly with the publishers. 4. How to search legal material on the Internet The golden rule in comparative law - just behave as the natives do - applies equally to research on the Internet. If the research is not to be left to pure chance, one has to know in advance where one could be successful. This requires at least a certain familiarity with the information structure within the foreign system. For simple research, it generally does not make sense to become a customer of a commercial service such as WESTLAW, LEXIS, JURIS or CELEX. Therefore, the knowledge of how to use freely available sites is crucial. 4.1 Search engines Just as for general research on the Internet, search engines allow one to scan the Internet for relevant information on law. Large search engines such as AltaVista(24) or Hotbot(25) use small programs called robots or bots, which crawl ceaselessly through the WWW. Search engines create a file of every page they visit and, in this way, compile huge databanks with keywords. Despite their enormous size and capacity, even the most powerful engines register only about 16 to 20% of all WWW-pages (of approximately more than 800,000,000 today)(26). Depending on the preciseness of the searcher's keywords, the result of the search can either lead to accurate and comprehensive references of the available material or a jumbled list of irrelevant links. To gain an idea of how to use general search engines there are useful manuals such as How to Search the WWW: A Tutorial for Beginners and Non-Experts (27) . Legal search engines enable the user to limit the search to some or all legal servers and, therefore, the searches are likely to result in more relevant references. FindLaw's Law Crawler(28) or the LawRunner Global Index(29), a feature of the Internet Legal Resource Guide(30), are examples of multi-national legal search engines, while Der Fahnder(31) allows searches on German legal servers only. 4.2 Legal indices