It was a pretty nice surprise for LSNC several months back to be asked by Google to present Advancing Knowledge Sharing with Google: The LSNC Story, with its focus on what we accomplished with The Findability Project.

Prior to but independent of that webinar, Google interviewed LSNC about The Findability Project and LSNC’s larger experience of integrating a Google Search Appliance with Google Apps and the Pika case management system. At its Google Enterprise customer solutions site, Google currently features and has posted its LSNC case study. Sure, it’s a marketing stroke but, still, it’s great to be included.

• Google announces you can upload anything to Google Docs
• Google apologizes for today’s vowel outage
• Google’s Picasa offers life-size photo prints
• Google == Topeka
• Google Analytics admits it is all about hits

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.

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.

It would have been handy to have this new Google interactive timeline a few months back, when I did a webinar session about findability and the Google search paradigm. Just the thing to nail down what happened when with the Google.

An especially engaging article from the front page of today’s New York Times: As Jurors Turn to Web, Mistrials Are Popping Up, emblematic of how pervasively and routinely search and social media are impacting jury trials.

Even if you don’t know what Google calls it, you already know from experience what Google calls its OneBox technology. You know, type in certain types of keywords in a Google search and you get a special, spot-on search result at the top of the page. For example, weather sacramento or movies sacramento, that sort of thing.

Well, Google has a new one we in California can especially appreciate: The earthquake OneBox. Yes, now you can get the the latest earthquake california vibe via Google. For more info, read Shaking up earthquake searches.

Quake on, people!

Tonight’s VP debate prompts my highlighting a new Google labs gizmo that debuted this last week: In Quotes. Very nice, actually fun implementation that enables you to quickly locate published news accounts with quotes from leading political candidates, including the current usual suspects. Gotta love that little spin button, too.

Need to locate voter information? Say, where to vote or getting your hands on registration information? Google Maps is all over it with its 2008 U.S. Voter Info site, a searchable database of election information powered by Google Search and Maps.

As much as I love all things Google, like many I have become somewhat jaded at hearing the “latest” Google feature announcement. But I have got to admit, this one really made me sit up straight and read online this afternoon. From the official Google blog: A fresh take on the browser. For an interesting initial take, only one of innumerable blog posts to come, there is Google Blogoscoped’s Google Chrome, Google’s Browser Project. This is going to be really interesting.