Category Archives: Bing

Get Around with Google

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Posted in Bing, Google, Search | Tagged ,

One of my long time complaints about searching on the Web has been the inability to really control word proximity.  You can search in the major legal research databases by looking for words within the same sentence (term /s term) or paragraph (term /p term) or within a certain number of words (term /# term).  But that hasn’t been the case on the Web.

I’ve already talked about how Bing uses the near: operator to control proximity search on Bing.com.  I came across a tip today on how to use proximity search using the AROUND operator.  It works like the specific number proximity search (/#) where # is the number of words separating your terms.  A legal research proximity search

passenger /4 handgun

becomes

passenger AROUND(4) handgun

Like so many of the Web search engine tips, it’s easy to use and remember.  Two things to keep in mind.  First,  it needs to be UPPERCASE to work, so if your search result shows it lowercase, it’s using AROUND as a word, not an operator.

Second, when I tried the search in the search box on Google.ca, Google.com, and Google.com SSL, the search worked.  When I searched from the Web browser (Firefox and Chrome), the search only worked on Google.com and Google.com SSL; Google.ca converted AROUND to lowercase.  If you find that the proximity search isn’t working, you may want to go to the search engine to execute the search (or force Google.com as your default search provider by going to http://www.google.com/ncr (no country redirect)).

[Via Lifehacker; also Google Operating System Blog]

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Rocking the Old School Research Extensions for IE

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Posted in Add-on, Bing, File Management, Internet Explorer, Search, Windows | Tagged ,

Microsoft’s Internet Explorer continues to lag behind other Web browsers in providing tools for research.  I revisited two free IE add-ons from the first half of this decade that can provide some enhancements to your Internet Explorer-based research.  While they have some quirks and limitations that reflect their datedness, IE users may still find them worth trying.  They are the basic version of Copernic’s Agent and Cogitum’s Co-Citer.

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Robots Blocking Case Law Access

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Posted in Australia, Bing, Canada, Case Law, Google, U.K. | Tagged , ,

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.

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Real Time and Social Media Search: Beyond Twitter

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Posted in Bing, Collecta, Google, Social media, Twitter | Tagged ,

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.

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