For some inexplicable reason the DC courts’ website (www.dccourts.gov) is not properly indexed by Google or Bing. Although searches related to the DC courts will pull up hits on both Bing and Google that point to specific web pages on the DC courts’ website, these hits usually point to pages on the court system’s old website, a site that has not existed for years.
Clicking one of these links brings one to http://www.dccourts.gov/oldsite.html with a suggestion that the searcher should “Please visit our new website at www.dccourts.gov Thank you!” www.dccourts.gov is the “new” (as of several years ago) main site for all non-federal DC courts. Because the problem exists in both Bing and Google I assume that the fault lies with the information technology employees who maintain this website. Google’s Webmaster interface and Microsoft’s similar interface for its Bing product allow users to tinker with how their sites are displayed or made searchable on Google or Bing and perhaps the DC courts’ webmasters have somehow, for some reason, done something to make their site not searchable. I assume that this was not done on purpose, but this seems to have been going on for years with nothing done to correct it. The unfortunate result is that a lot of very useful information about the DC courts and DC court procedure that is available on the site is very difficult to access. The site does have an internal site search function, but it is not as capable as Google/Bing and, in any event, many users are likely not to think to use it.