Webdogs 2.0 » google

Our final 15 minutes of Google fame

Brian Lawlor — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 05:54:58 +0000

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.

Fast breaking Google news

Brian Lawlor — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 15:49:27 +0000

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

Legal research and the need to be “more like Google”

Brian Lawlor — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 02:01:26 +0000

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.

Understanding Google real-time search

Brian Lawlor — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 19:11:03 +0000

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.