Making court documents more publicly accessible was one of Aaron's projects (circa 2008). He and project collaborators downloaded more than a million documents from the government's PACER electronic access system using public library terminals and attracted the attention of the FBI.[1] Part of the goal at the time was to uncover privacy violations in filed court documents that were legally a matter of public record but behind a lucrative, government administrated pay wall.[2]
There is something important to be said for the social and moral importance of keeping the public record publicly accessible. The justification for these intermediaries to exist and extract rent from the cataloging of public information grows slimmer and slimmer, but cataloging and indexing everything in a common law (precedent based) system is tremendously expensive. I suspect that developing of an algorithm to usefully search the dense and interweaving web of judicial opinions, case history, written legislation, and jurisdictions in which all those elements apply/overlap/supersede each other is also a massive capital investment.
It all does have to be paid for somehow, and I don't think how to fund is a settled question. Pay walls clearly have pernicious externalities (privacy violations go unnoticed; access to law is practically limited to professionals for whom the costs are a business expense). But I don't trust the state to properly fund or develop such a service through general tax either.
Consider supporting the individuals in this thread who are working to make that sort of open information access in law a reality, and consider also who will seek rent from the finished service who will not.