By Bill Hartzer · Published
What this site is
It is the companion to The Expert Record, and it exists because the book was built to last. Anything that changes — the decided cases and where they stand, what the platforms retain, the state of rulemaking, guidance issued to particular professions — was deliberately left out of the printed volume and put here, where it can carry a date and be corrected.
The rules this site is written under
The same production rules as the book, and one more that matters more here.
Nothing here characterizes a holding. Entries state what a professional did and what a tribunal did. Readers arriving at a single page have not read the surrounding argument, so the discipline has to be stricter, not looser.
Nothing here is legal advice. Whether any of it bears on your matter is a question for counsel, and this site is not a substitute for asking one.
Everything perishable carries a date. A reference page without a checked-on date is worse than no page, because it invites reliance it cannot support.
Who maintains it
Bill Hartzer has spent more than twenty-five years at the intersection of search engines, domain names, internet infrastructure, and digital evidence. Founder of Hartzer Consulting and DNAccess, he serves as an expert witness in matters involving search engine marketing, online advertising, web analytics, domain ownership, and internet investigations.
His expert work runs to reviewing evidence, preparing expert reports, analyzing historical technical data, conducting forensic internet investigations, and explaining technologies in language that attorneys, judges, and juries can follow. Much of it is investigative rather than advisory: historical website analysis, WHOIS and DNS history, search engine history, domain ownership and attribution, and the reconstruction of what a site or a campaign actually did at a date now years past.
The book grew out of that work rather than out of an interest in artificial intelligence as a subject. The questions it answers are the ones that arrived in engagements — what the record of this analysis will look like if it is produced, what an examiner will be able to establish from it, and what a professional has to do at the desk, months earlier, for the answer to be a good one.
Why the book and the site are separate
Because they have different obligations. A book has to be right for years and cannot be recalled; a reference page has to be right today and can be corrected this afternoon. Putting both kinds of material between the same covers produces a book that is stale in a year and a reference nobody can update, which is the failure mode of most practitioner titles written about a moving technology.
So the division is strict. Principle, method, and the Standard are in the book, fixed. Case identifications, dispositions, corrections, and revised working papers are here, dated. Where the book needs to point at something that moves, it points at this site by name rather than describing the thing itself.
How this site is built
It is static HTML. There is no content management system, no comment system, no tracking beyond what a plain web server logs, and no third-party script of any kind. Pages are generated from source files and uploaded; what you receive is a file, not the output of a program running on request.
That choice is partly about durability — a static file will still render in ten years — and partly about the same discipline the book argues for elsewhere. A reference that depends on a running application depends on that application continuing to run correctly, and the failure mode of an application quietly serving wrong content is a page that looks exactly like a page serving right content.
Corrections
Errors are posted on the errata page with the date. If you find one, write to record@theexpertrecord.com.
That applies to everything here, including the argument. If a page states a principle you think is wrong, or draws a distinction that does not hold in your field, the author would rather hear it than not — several of the book's sharper passages exist because a practitioner in a discipline the author does not work in explained why the first version did not survive contact with their work.