There is a constant tension for legal researchers between what makes them effective and what their information and service providers feel is commercially viable.  Since this blog is about online research, I will stay on that side of the fence, although this applies to print research just as much.  We have lived in a golden age of free research tools that supplement how we can find information.  Our paid databases are slowly improving too, although they still lag behind free Web tools significantly despite having richer content and better search.

Let’s talk about search.  Google recently decided that it wanted to use the + search operator inside its social project called Google+.  It is an eminently understandable commercial decision.  However, it takes away a tool that researchers had to limit their searches, and one that was essentially universal.  This impacts training as much as productivity.  It is a small thing, but it has an impact and it is not clear that the impact is neutral, let alone positive.  Similarly, Google has gone through a number of product changes, eliminating specialized search functionality that looked at government content, academic content, and, most recently, programming code.  Their continuing efforts to eliminate low quality content – called Google Panda – continues to impact sites that may or may not be content farms.  The difficulty this raises is that the ability of the individual expert’s content to float to the top of a researcher’s results may be diminished or, for all practical purposes, eliminated.

There has also been a love hate relationship between RSS and many commercial providers.  Google Reader, one of the last remaining RSS readers with a large following, has been rolled into the Google+ environment.  The significant resistance to this by Reader’s devotees, known as sharebros, has not diminished the fact that it remains a popular reader.  One impact has been the ability to share RSS items with others.  Reader itself no longer generates an RSS feed, since shared posts go into Google+, which does not have an RSS feed (and is very difficult to scrape, as I’ve found when I tried).  Commercially it makes sense, but it is a productivity hit.  Similarly, Facebook continues to tweak its interface and how it handles RSS, with the latest modification ringing the death knell bells for RSS again.  Admittedly, we have been hearing about the death of RSS for awhile.  Changes that negatively impact the ability for researchers to use RSS to support their information management are almost certain to diminish the utility of RSS.

Some changes, like privacy settings in the social networks, can actually benefit the legal researcher.  As more content moves into social platforms like Facebook and Google+, and their privacy settings become sufficiently complicated that the average user is likely to set them inexpertly, there will be ways to mine information that people are sharing unintentionally.  In that case, social sites are trying to make commercially sensible choices to meet their customers’ perceived needs but the complexity unravels some of the benefits.

This might seem to strengthen the argument that the future rests with paid databases, which might somehow be more stable in functionality and features.  However, online commercial legal research tools are not necessarily providing the same degree of functionality with the same ease of use as the freely available sites have.  It is an interesting tension with which to co-exist, as the commercial demands of research tools impact the productivity needs of the researcher.

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