Category Archives: Google Chrome

Make Your Right Click Menu Do Magic with Spellbook

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Posted in Add-on, Bookmarklet, Google Chrome, Internet Explorer, Link Shorteners | Tagged ,

Bookmarks (or Favorites, as they are known on Internet Explorer) enable you to save a link to a page so that you can return to it in the future. A close relative of the bookmark is the bookmarklet.  It usually blends a link to a site with some additional code so that, when you click on it, an additional action is performed.  For example, if you use the Bit.ly sidebar bookmarklet, it opens a window and automatically shortens the URL of the page you are viewing.  As you add these bookmarklets to your research experience, you can organize them in a folder for easy access.  The only drawback to having them in a folder is that you may forget what you have in that folder unless you use them regularly.

One way to keep them more visible, if you use Google Chrome, is to add the Spellbook extension to put them on your right-click menu.  Internet Explorer users since version 7 will be familiar with this concept.  Highlight a word on a Web page, place your mouse beside it and click your right mouse button, and a number of options appear including Internet Explorer Accelerators.  The Accelerators work very much like bookmarklets, in that you can send the text to be translated or inserted into a blog or saved to some other location.

As Lifehacker explains, Spellbook works the same way.  It becomes an entry on your Google Chrome right-click menu, so that once you are looking at a page and right-click, you will see Spellbook in the menu list.  Select Spellbook, and you casee all of your bookmarklets and can select the one you want to use.  How does it know which bookmarklets to use?  You place them in a bookmarklets folder and Spellbook uses that to create its menu.

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Navigate Long Web Pages with On-the-Fly Tables of Contents

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Posted in Add-on, Firefox, Google Chrome, Opera | Tagged , ,

Expert Web researchers are familiar with the built-in find function of their Web browser.  Get to a long page, hold down your CTRL key and hit F then type in the keyword you are looking for in the haystack of information in front of you.  Google Chrome users may also know about the Google Quick Scroll extension, which takes your Google search keywords and displays a small pop box so you can quickly navigate to the occurrences of your keywords.

MakeUseOf took a look at another set of extensions that can be helpful when you are looking at long Web pages.  Web pages are often created with visual cues to show the difference between, say, section headers and regular text.  These extensions will analyze the underlying code in a Web page and build a table of contents based on that.  This can be helpful because you can see what the hierarchy of a particular page is and navigate to the area that is most appropriate.  Unlike the keyword-based methods above, it gives you a better overall understanding of the document you’re reading.  The MakeUseOf article mentions a Firefox extension, HeadingsMap, that will generate these tables of contents on the fly.  On page 38 in the book, I also mention Outliner for Firefox (now defunct) and Chrome Outliner for Google Chrome.  Chrome users might also take a look at HTML5 Outliner, an extension which leverages some of the new descriptive tags in HTML5 but also works on older content, or at TableOfContents.  Opera users have two options, either their own HTML5 Outliner or Table of Contents extensions.

Unfortunately for legal researchers, much of the content for which these outliners would be most useful – statutes and cases, for example – are often not marked up in a way that generates a table of contents.  If you add them to your research toolkit, keep your other quick finding tools at hand.

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What to Do About Content Farms and Your Search

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Posted in Blekko, Google, Google Chrome | Tagged

A hurdle for any online researcher is the increased noise in results generated by content farms.  These sites generate a huge amount of content with the purpose of generating traffic, by appearing in search results more often.  The problem is that the content farm can be in the eye of the beholder.

If you find that your search results are overly seasoned with content farm results, you can take one of two approaches recently announced.  The first is Blekko‘s, who has announced that they are automatically filtering content farms out of their results.  The problem with this approach is that they are choosing what sites to filter out.  You might agree with the list but I know that at least two of the sites on the list are ones that I find useful information on.

The alternative is an approach Google is experimenting with, which is a new Google Chrome extension to essentially crowdsource what to block.  You can block results for your own research, but Google will look at the data to see what sites are being frequently blocked.

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Search Across Many Sources with WebMynd

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Posted in Add-on, CanLII, Case Law, Content, Firefox, Google, Google Chrome, Internet Explorer, Safari, Screencast, Search, Social media, Twitter | Tagged ,

There are a number of search tools that will retrieve results from more than one location.  Google is a great example, where the results display relevant images or even Youtube videos.  Google Mail can search Google Docs and Google Sites at the same time.  WebMynd expands those possibilities across other Web sites, search tools, and accounts to retrieve content from a variety of sources.

When you search using Google after installing their add-on, a small vertical bar will appear on the right side of your screen.  It is populated with a variety of sites that can be searched, from news to shopping to personal productivity and social media.

Webmynd have developed free Web browser plug-ins for Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, and Apple Safari to enable the search bar.  There is even a version for Microsoft Internet Explorer, but when I tried it, it was missing connections to some of the resources I would use the most, like Google Mail.

This is actually a custom search bar, geared as much to publishers who want to create their own tool for their users as Webmynd’s.  In fact, the developers are focusing in other areas, so if you don’t see a resource that you can use out of the box or tweak, this probably isn’t something you want to follow up.

You can install the custom Webmynd search bar I created, utilizing many of the prebuilt sources from Webmynd (Google Mail, Docstoc, Quora, Twitter, etc.) and supplementing with my own law-related sites:  a couple of the Legal Information Institutes, JDSupra, and so on.   The Webmynd search bar works great if there is a single search box on the site you’re trying to use.  If there isn’t, it seems to choke.  Also, since most of the LIIs block indexing of their case law for privacy reasons, you are limited to legislative results.  Likewise, Google Custom searches, even using search boxes anchored by domain names like Feefiefoefirm.com, weren’t usable.

Here’s what it looks like in action (4 minutes, Youtube.com)

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