The House of Butter notes that Qudoc, a new Australian legal search resource, has run into problems accessing AustLII content. Like many of the legal information institutes or LIIs, CanLII and BAILII included, AustLII blocks external organizations from using search spiders to index its case law. These blocks include Google and other common Web search engines.
Iterasi began as one of a number of stand-out, free research notebook tools. The company has now developed a line of products directly aimed at lawyers, particularly litigators. PageNotary is a Web clipper on steroids, grabbing not just individual pages but digging deep into sites, crawling and saving extensive amounts of content. I mention a number of stand-alone products like this in the book, but PageNotary keeps everything in the cloud. It also says it can dig into password-protected, firewalled content.
The IterasiArchives product appears to be an umbrella for Iterasi’s other products, the PageNotary and postivepress tools. It enables you not only to manage the sites and content you have spidered and indexed, but also monitor social media and real-time streams, including RSS.
If you have the Finding and Managing Legal Information book, you’ll notice that I discuss the free Iterasi notebook. This is ideal for solos or individual research needs, but is now hard to find on the Iterasi Web site. You can still sign up for a free Iterasi account and the main login link will allow you to login later.
One of the reasons I like Iterasi is that it is one of the most powerful research extensions available for Internet Explorer. If you are using either Microsoft Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox, you can download an extension to make clipping easier. Google Chrome and researchers with other Web browsers can download the bookmarklet at the same link.
The shift of Iterasi into the legal vertical market specifically will be interesting to watch. There are already dozens if not hundreds of cloud-based e-discovery and litigation products. Iterasi has already proven itself as a research and clipping tool and it will be interesting to see these broader efforts mature.
When social media is discussed, the same names come up as near synonyms for the concept: Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Many of the search engines that are devoted to monitoring social media are similarly limited. Microsoft’s Bing Social Search and Google’s Update both return results from Twitter and nowhere else. My favorite real-time search, Collecta, returns results from the most obvious sites as well as other less known, and different types of content: blog comments, videos, etc.
Pandia Search Engine News did a nice round up yesterday of 6 real time search engines. They mention Collecta and a number of others. Not surprisingly, some of them are primarily Twitter search.
I won’t rehash the article, which is very helpful, but here are a couple of thoughts that might help lawyers. Topsy was new to me, since it is often filtered out by corporate Web filtering focused on social media. The results set is not particularly different from other Twitter searches, but they have a nice Expert feature. Click on the Expert link at the top, type in your search, and it will attempt to return a list of possible authorities, on Twitter, that match your keyword. This can help if you are using Twitter as a current awareness tool in finding people who are talking about your topic, and are well-regarded. The expert query appears to rely on how often the person’s content is mentioned.
Another that was new to me was 48ers. While not as extensive as Collecta, it aggregates results from Digg.com, Delicious.com bookmarks, and Google Buzz, as well as Facebook. Since these are different from those at Collecta, it would be a good complementary site if you are looking at something in real-time (give or take).
The other search tools seem to be powerful for Twitter results but not for mining much else. The article is a good sign that real-time search is popping up all over, and some of the Twitter-only sites like Leapfish.com are trying interesting things with presenting their real time results.
Lawyers who have started to move their practices into the cloud may be using a number of the free Google applications. If you are using Google Mail and the Google Docs or Google wiki tool called Sites, you can now do a global search across all areas. The Google Operating System blog describes this lab feature that you can activate in your GMail account.
Once you have activated the feature, you should see your search mail button change to search mail and docs. Your search results will be segmented, with e-mail appearing first and Google Docs and Sites matches below. You can click on a link on the Docs and Sites results header to show just non-email results.
These free apps shouldn’t be confused with the paid version called Google Apps, which comes with tighter integration and additional functionality through the Google Apps Marketplace.
I activated the feature and it is nice to see results returning from both Mail and Docs accounts. So far it is not returning anything from my Google Sites so I will be investigating further to see why that content appears to be excluded. However, the increasing integration between the free Google apps is a bonus for any solo or small law firm who is relying on these tools. Searching across areas can be more efficient than having multiple apps open at once.