Category Archives: Bing

Lawyers Can Get Nearer With Bing Search Queries

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Posted in Bing, Case Law | Tagged , ,

I’ll admit I’m a Google user.  I appreciate that Microsoft’s Bing search engine is often prettier to look at, and has made early attempts at Twitter and social search, but it’s rare that I swing over to use it for any research.  I think this is partly because Bing is permanently tied in my mind to Prof. Ken Gould’s frequent mention during Civil Procedure of the Twin Bing candy bar, not to search.

Bing inherited the limitations from Microsoft’s Live search, which is that you really couldn’t do much with controlling the search query.  I’ve got a comparison chart in the text that compares a number of Canadian fee-based legal research products with Google and Bing and the Web engines are definitely lacking in some of the advanced search power.

So I was delighted to see that Bing’s advanced search syntax is now much more powerful than before and includes a particular feature that I miss on the Web:  the within limit.  If you do a query in a fee based legal research system, you can typically require a search to have keywords within so many words of each other:

cch w/5 lsuc

It can help you with searching for case names that are not strictly X v. Y.  It can help if you are trying to pinpoint a term of art and it’s used a bit more loosely than you expect.  But on the Web, you’re pretty much limited to wildcard searching like Google’s:

cch * lsuc

which means that something will be between those two terms but you can’t control how much something.

Bing now has the ability to let you search near: something else.  If for example, I wanted to emulate the fee-based legal research search query, I could type the following into Bing:

cch near:5 lsuc

and it would act like the w/5 search limiter that is familiar to legal researchers in practically all fee-based legal research systems.  There would appear to be a positive productivity impact.  Compare the results from typing in the following two searches:

  • riparian and accretion:  27,500 results
  • riparian near:4 accretion:  1,370 results

If you are using specific legal concepts or terms of art, this may save you a lot of time in narrowing your search results.

You can read about the entire search syntax, although most of it appears to have been around, although perhaps hidden, through advanced search.  You cannot get to the advanced search option until you have first run a basic search, a design that has always seemed a little wrong to me.  What’s interesting is that the search syntax is not available from the Bing advanced search, which takes you to these tips.  They do not provide anywhere near the same choices as the full search syntax.

[via Mary Ellen Bate's Librarian of Fortune]

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Bing Broadens Social Media Search

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

Whether you want to find more about a currently trending topic on the Web or learn what people are saying about you, social media is a great resource to mine.  The trouble is applying search tools to it.  Until now, the focus has been on Twitter, with both Bing’s initial search foray and Google’s Replay focused on showing real-time streams from that popular microblogging site.

Now Bing is expanding to the other major social media site, Facebook.  This can be helpful since there is so much more activity on Facebook, more extensive content being added, and pages and profiles being auto generated by the Facebook system.

It is still limited – searching Twitter and Facebook is only a part, even a large part, of social content available on the Web – but it can be a great starting point.

Unfortunately, when I took a look at the search, it was down and they were trying to restart the service.  Bing.com’s Twitter search did not pull up the same results as a Google search of Twitter posts.  You may find that you still need to look in more than one location to find posts by a particular user (@davidpwhelan) or on a given topic, with the hash tag (#legalit).

The inclusion may be helpful if you are monitoring your online reputation or those of your clients, as you may find system-created content faster using a more comprehensive search than the tools available at a particular social media site.

[ReadWriteWeb:  Facebook Firehose Comes to Bing]
[More from Microsoft]

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Mining Social Media for Information for Your Practice

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

There is so much hype around social media and social networking, the former changing how we communicate and the latter extending our awareness of people with whom we might not have had much in common (and may still not).  The marketing aspects of Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, among others, have received a lot of press in law-oriented blogs and publications (like the American Bar Association Law Practice magazine).  I touch on this a bit in an article in the Web Watch column in this month’s Law Technology News, and it relates to the text as well.  Social media and networking sites provide a wealth of information that can increasingly provide current awareness and context in ways that it could not in the past.

Unlike the Law Technology News article and a presentation I’m giving this Friday at the Law Society’s Solo and Small Firm conference on social media, I’d like to focus on the business information side of this research.  There’s an astounding amount of information available now and, as I suggest in the Law Technology News article, it goes far beyond Twitter.  But this is the starting point in most cases.  Search engines like Bing.com and Google have focused on it because it is the dominant life-streaming service and haven’t gone much past it.  Tools like Collecta.com – which I discuss in the text and which I think is a real stand out in real-time Web search – are aggregating far more diverse information.  In fact, when you compare a search on Twitter messages on Bing, Google, and Collecta, you realize that there is no one perfect source for finding this information.  Given a choice, I’d start with Collecta.

In many cases, you do not need to be a part of these services to take advantage of them.  Take TwapperKeeper.com, for example (based on the Trapper Keeper primary school binder, for those unfamiliar with the reference and who didn’t live in the U.S. in the ’70s).  You can create a personal archive of Twitter tweets that were shared on the Web, even though you weren’t a part of it.  Blog comments, which you can unearth in a number of places.

There are interesting new services coming out, like Backtype.com.  But they aren’t law-related or even really research sites.  If you vist Backtype, you can type in a Web site address (URL) and it will give you information about what kind of social engagement it is creating.  You can see tweets related to the site and see how it fares on crowd-aggregating sites like Digg, Reddit, and so on.  As sites like these aggregate results from other sites (like mining LinkedIn comments that are not exposed to the Twitterverse, for example, or highlighting blog comments that point to the same site or page, or identify aggregate Bit.ly links), there will be increasing possibilities for finding information about a business.

Finding legal information has moved away from just finding law or commentary about law in the traditional formats.  When you think about social media and networking, think about the flip side of the marketing benefits.  When you use it to market, you are typically pushing information out.  But you can mine it for your own research or client development purposes as well.

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