Discovering court websites

Author: Amy DiPierro Version: 2020-09-08

This file describes further resources for finding other court websites, with an emphasis on Tyler Technologies’ Odyssey sites.

Finding Odyssey subdomains

Strategy 1: nmmapper.com

  • This subdomain finder is the best tool I’ve found to search for subdomains.

  • Since Odyssey websites don’t always have a predictable subdomain, it will be good ot continue to search for new subdomains as we come across them.

  • Here are some searches to run:

    • tylerhost.net/

    • tylerhost.net/Portal/

Strategy 2: Google Custom Search API

  • We can use Google’s Custom Search API to run targetted searches that surface websites built with Odyssey. I’ve not run this yet but it might be worth it.

  • Some suggested searches that turn up promising results:

    • court portal “© 2020 Tyler Technologies, Inc.” -site:tylertech.com -iTax -stock -taxes

Existing efforts to scrape court data

  • The Police Data Accessibility Project, an open data initiative started on Reddit this summer, has already compiled some basic databases of court websites upon which we can build:

    • The group’s Public Access to Court Records State Links.csv GoogleSheet contains a partial list of court websites with the names of vendors sometimes noted.

    • It might be worth glancing at their GitHub and Slack channel from time to time to see if there are opportunities to learn from their research and code.

  • The Tubman Project, a nonprofit that is trying to build software to “make legal defense available to the masses”, has also compiled some data on Tyler Technologies platforms in this thread.