A few months back, there was a good amount of copy about Google Scholar features for searching federal and state court decisions — an impressive step up for using Google, at least at a consumer-user level, to find court decisions, but (puhleeeze) not as a tool for serious research of legal consequence. More recently the New York Times ran a feature article about changes afoot in Westlaw and Lexis, both of which “will undergo sweeping changes in a bid to make it easier and faster for lawyers to find the documents they need.” The opening salvo in this clash of the legal research titans occurred this week with debut of WestlawNext. To hear Westlaw and Lexis talk about it, what they are in part reacting to is the perceived need to be “more like Google.”

Yes, but one’s understanding of that conclusion depends on how one defines or explains what it means to “Google” things. At the recent TIG conference, during the “findability” segment I presented, I made a point stressing the significance of Google as not being “Google” itself, as pervasive as it is in all our lives. Rather, the significance of Google is the dramatic paradigm shift that has occurred in how we search for and use information. Google is a primary agent of this paradigm shift but certainly not the only one. And the connections between specific search paradigms (universal search, vertical search, faceted search, and so on), the relative ease of locating or discovering information, and improvements in user-interface and usability design — all are converging to enhance the findability of what one is looking for.

That said, the impact of all these trends on specialized (re)search tools like Westlaw and Lexis is pretty obvious. If “Wexis” users are demanding their research tools become “more like Google,” what the users are saying is that those companies must make a paradigm shift, or they’ll go to a company that gets it.

Want to get a feel for how GIS mapping is being used effectively as a tool in the progressive community? Then read this: The Revolution Will Be Mapped, a recent article published by Miller-McCune Online Magazine. The article highlights the well regarded work of the Cedar Grove Institute for Sustainable Communities. And here’s a plug for the home team: The article also quotes Eric Schultheis, former GIS honcho at LSNC’s Race Equity Project, the gravitational center of LSNC’s ongoing GIS mapping projects.

Like you need a link to an article about the new Apple iPad… But here’s an especially good one – The Apple iPad – Amazing – First Impressions – with an unusually rich array of photos, from one of the better usability design sites out there, baekdal.com. While reading the article, think less “shazam” and more “usability.”

I’m not sure what happened with the slides or recording of the Knowledge Management session at the recent 2010 TIG Conference. The session doesn’t show up in the LSC documentation of the event.

In any event, here’s a set of the slides for my “findability” segment, about search paradigms, findability as a concept and what we’ve done to implement enterprise search using a Google one-two punch: the Google Search Appliance in combo with the Google Apps platform. Also, here’s the brief flash video of our portal front end and search result/filtering examples that I ran during the presentation but displayed so poorly. The point of the video was to give the audience a real-world feel for how it all works. Again, my apologies for how bad the video displayed in that setting. Lesson learned.

Last Wednesday at the 2010 LSC TIG Conference, Chicago-Kent’s Ron Staudt and I did a joint session, Knowledge Management – What It Is, Why It Matters, and (Google) Options For Making What You Know Findable. Ron, of course, was cogent, concise and charismatic and stayed within his presentation window and hit all his marks. Me? Regrettably, after all these years, I still haven’t figured out how to squeeze 10 pounds of cement into a 5 pound bag, and didn’t even get to several key points I had hoped to make about enterprise search and The Findability Project. To make matters worse on my end, at the beginning of my segment the Flash demo of how LSNC’s enterprise search front end works faltered badly since it displayed so poorly when projected. (More than one person mentioned to me afterwards that they were simply not able to see accurately what I was describing at the moment. (Uh, it seemed like a good idea at the time.)

With those apologies out of the way, allow me to annotate a few points now to make up for at least a few things that I did not cover during the presentation:

The LSNC “portal,” “intranet” and “document repository”

I feel I successfully got across the point that there is a broader sense of “search” at play that is important to grok, as an organization works toward enterprise or so-called “universal” search. However, because I ran out my clock and didn’t have time to talk at length, I didn’t quite get to describing the varied content targets that LSNC has identified as valuable, useful and usable and therefore all that which we wanted to make readily, easily findable. In going over all that, in passing I mentioned that The Findability Project originally included a SharePoint component which is now being abandoned, in favor of our relying on components of the Google Apps platform, specifically, Google Sites.

The LSNC Shared Portal demo’d but not successfully displayed during the presentation is itself not part of Google Sites. The portal is itself a point-of-entry front end built on a WordPress PHP installation, and designed to complement our Pika 4.0 installation, which is also a PHP application. The portal is a point-of-entry but not a strictly controlled one, in the sense that users are not required to go through it to access either Pika or their Google Apps. But the portal is a custom user-interface that affords our users quick, efficient access to all the core web-based applications they need to do their work, plus a program calendar and a slew of LSNC-specific newsfeeds. And then there is the portal’s killer app: The enterprise search box, the findability trigger that searches all of the valued, useful, usable shared content. The enterprise search box initially gives you what I described in the session as “horizontal” search; at the (poorly displayed) search result page our users then have access to “vertical” filtering options.

And, as illustrated with the search for my personnel information and photo, our users can use the enterprise search box to do special data queries to get specially tailored search results. For example, when I did the demo search for “staff brian,” here’s what was basically happening: Triggered by the keyword “staff,” the Google Search Appliance (GSA) activates a OneBox module that did a query of our Pika CMS database, returned that query result as XML, which in turn was processed through XSLT and output for display as HTML.

The other private content areas I described are all now, or soon will be, part of our domain’s Google Sites. All of our organization’s “official” intranet content is now positioned at a Google Sites location, as is our new “shared document repository.” The GSA works very well with the Google Apps platform, and natively integrates with Google Analytics, among other things. Great stuff.

SharePoint issues

My observation at the beginning of my segment that LSNC was the first legal services field program to adopt the Google Apps platform and the first to abandon SharePoint was not intended to be provocative. It was intended to be transparent about what we are doing and why. Unfortunately, I never got around to explaining our organization’s views on SharePoint.

The short version is this: Given what we want and need to do with our shared work and collaboration space, we simply no longer see any advantages to using SharePoint. Zero. Zip. Nada. At launch of The Findability Project we viewed SharePoint as a key component for hosting and building and sharing content. And SharePoint is a great option for that. It is a very impressive product. But about six months into The Findability Project, Google unleashed Google Sites as part of the Google Apps platform, and for us it was a game changer. Google Apps is free (for non-profits, for the foreseeable future), we don’t have to host, maintain, secure, update or fix it, and Google continues to aggressively improve its features, along with everything else within Google Apps. And we are able to do pretty much everything we need to be able to do with it. True, SharePoint has an enormous mindshare within corporate America. And organizations do need to evaluate whether SharePoint has features or functionality that are unique or indispensible to it. For us, it has none.

Oh, and did I mention that the GSA works natively with Google Apps?

While not the reasons why we have bailed out on SharePoint, there are these views questioning what role SharePoint has in your future: Peter Campbell’s article, Why SharePoint Scares Me; and more contrariness from Dion Hichcliffe, Sharepoint and Enterprise 2.0: The good, the bad, and the ugly.

More self-criticism: What we don’t like about our user interface

Perhaps I spent too much time trying to drive home the importance of usability as a concept and how it relates to findability. I am fascinated by usability concepts and, after now years of practical experience, sobered by the reality of how challenging it is to do well. We are very pleased with what we have accomplished with our portal (and related search result page and Pika CMS) designs shown in the slides. But I also had planned on taking a few minutes to highlight what are remaining problems with our design, and “usability” thoughts about improving or fixing them. For example, we already plan on altering how we use tags as part of the portal page, and will soon be modifying the vertical filtering options on the enterprise search result page, to expand those options and make them more intuitive. I think we have done good. I think we can do better. And we will.

Knowledge management as poetry

I wasn’t entirely irresponsible about keeping within my allotted time. One thing I considered doing but dropped from my presentation to save time, was my giving a dramatic reading of the most famous poem ever about knowledge management. Yes, there is such a thing:

“The Unknown” by Donald Rumsfeld

As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don’t know
We don’t know.

[U.S. Department of Defense news briefing, February 12, 2002]

As far as I can tell, this was someone who never actually grasped basic concepts of findability.

But that’s me. What do I know.

I recommend Danny Sullivan’s way excellent post yesterday at Search Engine Lane, Google Launches Real Time Search, to get a superior handle on Google’s newly released search subset.

Google real-time web search has not rolled out to everyone yet. But the Search Engine Land article clues you into how to view it. There is a Google Labs front-end where you can try it out. (See the “RTSearch” in the URL?) As the article illustrates, do a search for “health care”, click on “Show options” and then “Updates” and you can view the rolling search results.

You may have more fun watching the real-time rolling search results for, say, Sarah Palin.

Proposed Formal Opinion Interim No. 08-0002 (Confidentiality and Technology) has been flying under the radar for most California attorneys, but for the first time the technology chicken is coming home to roost in the California Bar’s first proposed ethics opinion at the juncture of client confidentiality and technology. You can download the seven-page proposed opinion. The proposed opinion remains open to public comment until January 4, 2010.

On balance, it is an excellent description of how newer technologies impact the duties of competence and client confidentiality. It seems particularly wise in not addressing these issues by taking on particular technologies; rather it provides a sensible approach enabling an attorney to understand what the potential problems are and how they miight be resolved in a practical while ethical manner.

I differ with the opinion on language in the section about “legal ramifications to a third party who intercepts, accesses or exceeds authorized use of the electronic information.” The discussion at page five of the opinion does clear things up in that regard, but the summary point could be clearer. What I think they mean to say is “applicability of civil or criminal laws protecting an expectation of privacy, with consequences to a third party who intercepts, accesses or exceeds authorized use of the electronic information.”

Within the next few days the domain-specific site for The Findability Project will disappear. With completion of the project we have moved all of its content over to this site into The Findability Project Archive.

We are currently rebuilding some of the Webdogs 2.0 site infrastructure, a piece of which is the tag cloud that normally would appear to the right but is MIA at the moment. But it will reappear soon and when it does you can simply click on the “tfp” tag to view all The Findability Project posts.

Yes, I know there is an ongoing debate and an as yet unresolved legal settlement about the propriety and copyright legality of Google Books. But I have two family stories that bring home on a personal level the value of the Google Books concept.

The search context is this:

I am that person in my family who has become the historian, the one who has taken on the task of doing the whole family history and genealogy thing. This is something I have done since about 1990, and which became immeasurably more productive an undertaking since the late 90s, with the access-to-knowledge explosion we call the Web and the dramatic improvements in web search and findability. The bulk of research I have done in the last five years has been at Ancestry.com, the reigning fee-based genealogy site (and one well worth its cost). I have also found an enormous amount of other family-related material by simply searching publicly available web content.

Which brings me to Google Books. Doing some conventional Google searches, I found one thing I expected and another I did not. The one book I expected to find was Auto Math Handbook: Basic Calculations, Formulas, Equations and Theory for Automotive Enthusiasts, by John Lawlor, an uncle (now deceased) who back in the day was a well known automotive journalist and one-time senior editor of Motor Trend magazine. No one in my family remotely understands “displacement, stroke and bore,” but we loved Uncle John and it was great to rediscover his book.

The second personal Google Books story comes out of a search for the Butte Irish side of my family, something I have alluded to before. It is there that I discovered what is to me now the single most important court decision of the 19th Century: Lawlor v. Kemper, an 1898 Montana Supreme Court decision resolving a legal dispute between my great-grandfather William Vincent Lawlor and his partner over the sharing of an enormous real estate commission. (For perspective, multiply the numbers by 10 for a rough equivalent in current dollars and you’ll better understand the financial stakes.)

I am pleased to say my great grandfather was the prevailing party, notwithstanding some transparently bad behavior by his attorney. The decision includes this timeless bit analyzing the character of my great-grandfather’s partner:

From a casuistic standpoint, a possession of the ability to discharge a just obligation to a fellow man should encourage the performance of the duty. This case, however, serves to illustrate how easily, through wealth, even when acquired in a sudden and unexpected manner, avarice can be substituted for conscience, and human nature made revolting at the very time when all its higher traits are placed in a position to readily assert themselves.

True, I could have searched for this using Westlaw or Lexis but I did not know to do so. I found this because Google found it in one of its digital scans of 19th Century Harvard law books.

Thank you, Google.

An initial caveat: This study was fully funded by Google. That said, for those in the legal services community debating the respective advantages and/or disadvantages of Google Apps verses MS Exchange may be interested to read Google Apps & Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 – Total Cost of Ownership Analysis.

(The study is posted at MC+A, our GSA consultant for The Findability Project.)

The cost numbers for Google Apps are premised on a business Premier account, costs which would be predictably less for non-profits relying on the Education edition of Google Apps.