Posts tagged: google

  • Thursday
  • July 8
  • 2010

Our final 15 minutes of Google fame

LSNC logo

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.

  • Tuesday
  • February 2
  • 2010

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

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.

  • Tuesday
  • December 8
  • 2009

Understanding Google real-time search

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.

  • Friday
  • March 6
  • 2009

Get your local earthquake vibe via Google

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!

  • Wednesday
  • October 1
  • 2008

Google “In Quotes” gives new meaning to “spin”

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.

  • Tuesday
  • September 30
  • 2008

Google the Vote

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.

  • Monday
  • September 1
  • 2008

Holy Browser Wars, Batman!

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.

  • Monday
  • October 8
  • 2007

Explicating the LSNC Findability Project

The day I got on a plane for an extended trip to Europe, Legal Services of Northern California (LSNC) was notified it had been awarded funding for its 2007 Technology Innovation Grant (TIG) application. As it turns out, I was pretty much the last person to know. I spent the month of September without a phone or email or other contact with the office, and so I only heard about the TIG thing and many other developments once I got back to Sacramento.

There was a brief summary of all this year’s TIG awards released on September 12 by LSC but the description there of our project is, well . . . neither apt nor accurate. For those interested, we actually call it the LSNC “Findability Project” and its core purpose is to create a program-wide, highly user-friendly, enterprise-level knowledge-content management system. Here is how we stated the technological challenge in the first three paragraphs of our TIG application:

The structural scale and geographic reach of and substantive range of advocacy by Legal Services of Northern California exacerbates a fundamental dilemma all legal services field programs suffer: How does one make it fast, easy and intuitive for program staff to find and access all the different types of “knowledge content” within the four walls of the organization.

Within this organizational structure there is a wide range of substantive advocacy and administrative expertise, specialization and skill sets, all of which are sources for shared information and knowledge. By “information” we mean that the organization has a variety of documents and other digital data types—word processing files, databases, text files, PDF files, spreadsheets, XML files, presentations, images, video, and so on—that have content the organization perceives as valued and useful; by “knowledge” we mean that the information exists in a context that offers understanding. Random words identified in a document are only pieces of data; words in a document that makes sense and has apparent value is a document that has purpose and is useful; a “usable” document offers the promise of shared knowledge because it brings understanding of the information it contains from one person to another. And knowledge content that can be shared throughout the organization promises that the clients are inherently better served. (The converse is obviously an impossible case to make, i.e., the less the staff knows the better the clients are served.)

But there’s the rub: What does the organization do to assure its staff can find all the knowledge content that should be available to them? Why is this is a practical and technological challenge for LSNC? And what does this have to do with more effectively serving its clients?

So, how do we propose to do this? Our approach has three core components:

Hardware and Software Infrastructure

At its heart, the Project will be built on the enterprise-level Google Search Appliance. This will provide the core hardware and software infrastructure for a single, secure, unified tool for accessing all the usable institutional content available to LSNC staff from any internal or external location. By design, it will enable LSNC users to exploit all the familiar features of Google-based search technology to locate with exceptional relevancy any and all types of knowledge content wherever it may be within any and all organizational zones defined by LSNC. Once implemented, it will enable users to search for up to a million content records within the system. Additional layers of the knowledge content system will be the design and implementation of Google One-Box modules tailored for retrieval and interpretation of particular types of data most commonly valued and useful within the legal services work environment, plus integration of select Google APIs that fit into the larger project goals, including Google Analytics.

Standardized Methodologies and Protocols for Managing the Knowledge Content

Partnering with GSA technical experts, LSNC will work aggressively to formulate and finalize standardized methodologies and protocols for management of all the organization’s valued “knowledge content.” This process will include assessment of a range of techniques and practices to enhance and optimize search results for users of the system: institutional protocols and standards for identifying and tagging knowledge content; effective use of metadata; record naming conventions; vertical and hierarchical organization of data; and so on.

Project Transparency

The LSNC Findability Project will be a public project. LSNC will create a public web-based workspace to document in detail: the planning process for the Findability Project; identify and evaluate resources for the larger legal services community on searchability in general and the Google Search Appliance in particular; and create technical and tutorial content so that those who are interested can more readily understand and replicate the Project. This public aspect of the Project will provide a highly practical way for the LSC and others in the legal services community to monitor and evaluate the Project, i.e., see what is planned, what choices were made and why, how things were designed, what is the pertinent technical information implicated by the Project, what works and what doesn’t, and what has been accomplished.

Hey, we’ve been down this road before. The Pika people will remember our initial foray into this approach toward tech project transparency three years ago with Project Claire: Redesigning Pika, where we put it all out on the table to see what we were doing with Pika implementation at LSNC. So, we’re going to create another Project-specific web development site where you can follow the progress and all the nitty-gritty detail of the LSNC Findability Project and perhaps learn a few things here and there about using modern search technologies to get the job done. Call it the good, the bad and the ugly but whatever it is we’re going to share it all with you as we work our way through it over the 18-month life of the project.

Why do it this way? We’re Webdogs. It’s what we’re all about.

  • Monday
  • August 13
  • 2007

Citing Google for the very first time

One always remembers the “first time” and citing a Google search in an appellate brief is no exception. At least for me.

The context has to do with my day job as a practicing lawyer. One of the myriad things I do is represent a special “long-term care ombudsman” program that investigates and mediates allegations of abuse, neglect and mistreatment of nursing home patients and other long-term care residents. The investigations are highly sensitive and highly confidential, and under California constitutional and statutory law are also highly privileged. Predictably, the ombudsman investigations are viewed as a target-rich repository of potential evidence by some, and so the ombudsman program frequently gets served with subpoenas to compel disclosure.

That’s where I come in. In the normal course, discovery attempts are readily deflected once counsel and the court are appraised of the claims of privilege and confidentiality that shield the ombudsman—always a non-party to the litigation—from discovery.

But not always, and in a major way not in a recent case in which a California trial court ruled against the ombudsman program and entered an unprecedented, sweeping order requiring the disclosure of all the ombudsman’s investigatory records in a particular nursing home. Yipes! But LSNC was all over it and pursued an extraordinary writ from the appellate court to get a stay order stopping the discovery cold. Done! But it ain’t over ’til it’s over, right? As it turns out, there is no reported decision in any jurisdiction in the country on this particular type of ombudsman claim of privilege and confidentiality, and the discovery dispute has come to a head with full-on briefing and oral argument in a case of national first impression.

We had already briefed this puppy to the max, but the appellate court a few weeks ago requested a supplemental “letter brief” (code: keep it short … really short) from all involved about whether the case is moot and even if so whether the public interest character of the case warrants the court proceeding to decision. Well, not surprisingly, from our point of view as the “non-party” being dragged constantly into this case and so many others like it there was a very practical argument to be made: The issue is one of broad public impact because, among other things, there is this huge number of attorneys motivated to attempt this type of discovery. Fair enough observation, but how do we actually establish that fact as a non-party appearing before the appellate court in an extraordinary proceeding without a conventional record?

That’s where Google comes in. Here’s the single footnote we dropped into our letter brief:

There is a very large segment of the plaintiffs’ bar, not to mention any number of defense counsel, that would jump at the opportunity to compel disclosure of ombudsman records. Should the Court have any lingering doubts about the potential for recurrence of the type of discovery attempted in this case, petitioner invites the Court to do a simple search at Google using these six keywords—california attorneys nursing home abuse neglect mistreatment—and view the search results.

Ya gotta love the Google!

  • Sunday
  • June 3
  • 2007

NYT, QDF and other Google search mysteries

God, do I ever love the New York Times. Most of my days start with Starbucks and my home-delivered copy of the NYT, and Sundays are always the best of all days because there is always something wonderful to read. Today is no exception. For my fellow geekmeisters, here’s a must-read from today’s edition: Google Keeps Tweaking Its Search Engine, a long-form article with predictable bits about the Google corporate culture but with an emphasis on the mindsets of Google search engineers and their prime directive to make search better. Don’t know what QDF is? Read on.

  • Saturday
  • June 2
  • 2007

GoogBurner … just so you know

In case you hadn’t noticed or simply would want to know . . . with the acquisition of FeedBurner by Google there is now a small print disclaimer that displays when you login to your FeedBurner account. And I quote:

NOTE: Service of FeedBurner publisher accounts will not be interrupted as a result of the acquisition by Google. You will have a 14-day interim period ending June 15, 2007 to opt-out of allowing Google to service your account. If you take no action by June 15, 2007, the rights to your data will transfer from FeedBurner to Google. Opting out will terminate your user agreement with FeedBurner, permanently delete your FeedBurner account, feeds, and all related statistical data and history, and prevent the transfer of your data rights to Google. To opt-out, contact us via [accountx AT feedburner DOT com], provide your FeedBurner account Username, and request to have your FeedBurner account deleted. We will contact you at your registered email address to confirm your deletion request before completing it.

As lawyers say in legal memoranda, “emphasis in the original.”

  • Wednesday
  • May 16
  • 2007

Getting ready for Google 2.0

Hardly a day goes by without something new being announced about the growing Google web industrial complex, which increasingly is the central presence for the mainstream web user. And the tech lists we are all on will be weighing in the next few days about the Google push toward more apparent, more usable vertical search. And you’re not likely to find a better article from a better source than Search Engine Land‘s substantial post today about the coming changes: Google 2.0: Google Universal Search. Plus, the site includes a spiffy speed-date laying out it all out in Google’s New Navigational Links: An Illustrated Guide. (Go ahead. Kick yourself again for not buying at $85 a share.)

  • Sunday
  • April 8
  • 2007

Gmail and other Google miscellany

A few thoughts about our institutional use of the no-cost version of domain-hosted Gmail (now part of the Google Apps industrial complex) and some other Google tools, prompted by questions over time that have come to us from other legal services field programs:

  • LSNC is only a few months shy of a full year’s experience with domain-hosted Gmail, but the experience as a whole has gone very well. The service has been extremely reliable, vastly more so than the hosted service we used previously. Over time, almost all LSNC users have moved over and are now quite comfortable with the Gmail web-based interface. There are a few Outlook and Outlook Express hold-outs, but most folks found the switch irresistible once they bought into the convenience of universal access from work and home and wherever.
  • Prior to the changeover, complaints about spam were the number one tech problem; since then, spam questions have dropped off the radar. Totally. I can’t even recall the last time someone asked me about spam problems with their LSNC email account. That said, should you consider switching to Gmail for your domain, be sure to have users import their Outlook or Outlook Express contacts into their Gmail contacts, which will tell Gmail to shield those email contacts from being shuffled into the Gmail spam folder. It matters, big time.
  • There is no apparent limit on the number of email addresses you can request when signing up for Gmail as part of free Google Apps, but be sure to ask for plenty of them so you can get set up quickly from the get-go. Otherwise, you will need to cool your heels while awaiting approval for more addresses. A suggestion: Figure out how many email addresses you need (employees and volunteers) and then double that number. Even triple it, depending on how fast you think the demand may be for your organization. Be assured, as you use the service, you will find a growing need for more email addresses. (The Gmail admin panel is a breeze to use, by the way. And you can set up multiple individuals with admin privileges.)
  • When setting up your domain email accounts, consider setting up your users at the same time with a general-purpose Google account with that same email address. At first, we “encouraged” users to set up their own general Google accounts but passed off to them the task of setting up the general Google account so they could use the same email address for accessing Google Docs and other Google apps. But then we realized how inefficient it was to do that, and that approach just seemed to confuse folks unnecessarily. This is what we do now: There is a central Gmail administrator who creates and manages all our domain Gmail accounts. At the same time that she sets up a new account, she also sets up the new user’s general Google account. The new users are then told they can use the same LSNC domain email address and password to access not only their LSNC email account but also their accounts for other Google apps. And to the extent that varied Google apps are integrated, even with the free apps (e.g., Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Docs) the shared login username and password makes it all pretty effortless.
  • OK, so let’s say you have set up general Google accounts for your users. What other Google tools can we recommend? There’s lots to recommend, but we especially value Google Bookmarks, the vastly improved Google Reader and the underrated but very handy Google Notebook.
  • With the formal debut of the Google Apps business model, be mindful that a dichotomy has emerged between the freebie families-and-groups service cluster and the for-cost small business and enterprise versions. This is not just a difference in things like storage space and support service levels. There are some basic Gmail functions and integration features that have long since debuted in regular Gmail and are available in the for-cost Google Apps services (e.g., mail fetcher and Google Docs integration) — but are still not yet available in the free domain-hosted Gmail accounts. LSNC hardly views these as deal breakers, but certainly you should assure your organization is getting what you need or want.
  • The free version of domain-hosted Gmail integrates very nicely with Google Desktop. Yes, you can set your Google Desktop preference so it indexes your Gmail account, providing you with off-line access to all your email. Nice touch. Google Desktop setting to index Gmail account
  • That said, Google Desktop will index your Outlook contacts but not your Gmail contacts. (Boooooo!) It obviously would be extremely practical to be able to locate a contact to get an address or phone number via a Google Desktop search without having to open the Gmail interface, but there you have it … or shall I say, not.
  • Sunday
  • February 25
  • 2007

Attorney search button updated

There is a minor glitch in the California Attorney Search custom button for the Google Toolbar posted a few weeks back. The custom search button works just fine, thank you very much, but when the Google Toolbar search field is empty and you click on the custom button, it takes you to Webdogs 2.0, not the California Bar search page. Not good and not what was intended.

We’ve fixed it. For those of our California compadres who installed the button, to update it on your Google Toolbar select Options -> Buttons -> California Attorney Search, then Edit to open up the Button Details dialog box. Click the link “Update button to latest version from www.webdogs.org”, close your browser and then reopen it, and you’re good to go. Now, when you click on the icon on the Google Toolbar, regardless of whether the search field is empty or not, it will take you directly to the California Bar “Attorney Search” page. Better, no?

  • Monday
  • February 5
  • 2007

Googling California attorneys

As posted earlier to a broader audience at the LSNC main website, the Webdogs have created a very simple custom button for the Google Toolbar so that you can use the search box in the toolbar to do a direct name search for California attorneys at the California State Bar site. For our readers in California (or anyone else who wants to try it), if you have a current version of the toolbar installed, just click on Add California Attorney Search Button, follow the prompts and there you have it. To try it out, do a search for “Tony Joe Whi …,” uh, “Anthony Gilbert White.” Folks in California will appreciate the utilitiy of this, since so many of us use the California State Bar site as an attorney “contacts” address book.

This was pretty easy to do by just following Google’s handy-dandy, step-by-step Guide to Making Custom Buttons for Google Toolbar 4. The guide refers to Internet Explorer, but it works with Firefox as well now that the latest version of the toolbar for Firefox supports custom buttons. The “hardest” thing involved is actually not hard at all, assuming you know how to create a custom icon image. The guide provides a link to a site where you can encode your custom icon into ASCII text using base64 encoding.

  • Sunday
  • December 10
  • 2006

Google guide goodies

When not working on his killer karaoke rendition of “Polk Salad Annie,” BayLegal’s Tony “Joe” White takes time out to pass along to his Webdog buddies an occasional link for sharing. Most recently he sent along Ten Tips for Smarter Google Searches. Tips #1-5 are especially good refreshers on basic Google search syntax, as is Tip #8 about using fact-specific keywords to get the results you want.

There are all sorts of Google search resources out there. Among the best is the Google Guide (no, it is not part of Google, proper) that includes search tutorials for both novice and experienced users, plus a comprehensive but well-explained Google search syntax cheat sheet.

One of the more underutilized Google features is Google Suggest, which comes integrated in the Google Toolbar (how all true Webdogs roll) or as a Firefox extension. Of course, Google Suggest can be used to enhance your productivity. Or maybe not.

  • Sunday
  • November 12
  • 2006

Wag the Blog: Giving your people posting options

At the time the threshold problem was this: Assuming you have folks with something to say and something relevant to post about it, how do you make it really easy for the less tech savvy to add to your organization’s website?

Experience tells the Webdogs there is no easy answer to how to make things really easy for potential posters. Experience has also taught us that a user interface that seems slick and intuitive to the geek inclined, well, it just ain’t necessarily so to the typical LSNC staffer. And experience has further taught us that getting folks to be active contributors demands a system that minimizes the user-side barriers to writing and posting content. If there is a verity here, it is this: Every additional barrier, extra step or speed bump that precedes the user being able to do the task-at-hand, namely, composing and posting, then those obstacles inexorably discourage folks from doing just that.

LSNC has experimented with various web-based publishing platforms for three years now. The “light bulb” moment for LSNC occurred when Google bought out Blogger and stepped it up a touch by adding a Blogger button to the Google Toolbar, which offered a faltering idea about making it easier for multiple authors to contribute postings to the LSNC main page. At the time it seemed like a workable solution. We converted the LSNC home page to a custom Blogger template and recruited an editorial crew of several top advocates to share in the posting responsibilities. From that perspective, it all made sense. But Google’s implementation at that juncture of its newly slickified Blogger interface was very buggy and problematic, and the Webdogs found themselves dealing with frequent complaints from pretty much everyone they recruited as editors. It got pretty ugly. And over time we realized that, going forward, we would face significant limitations on what we could do using Blogger as a publishing platform at our domain. And we paid a price in lost good will with our editors.

So, we dropped Blogger and went whole hog for WordPress. Over time, we’ve deployed WordPress as the principal publishing tool for most substantive content areas at various LSNC web sites, including old stalwarts like its Cases and Regs summaries, and new content areas like The Race Equity Project, scheduled to debut this week.

But the challenge remains: How to make it as easy and practical as possible for contributors to compose and add content? With a fair amount of one-on-one’s to get folks comfortable with the nicely designed if fairly busy, not always intuitive WordPress Dashboard, we have succeeded in getting our long-time contributors accustomed to the quick login, composing and posting features in WordPress. That said, it seems fair to add that our WordPress users are reasonably comfortable with its interface, not because it is uniformly intuitive (which it is not), but because it is now familiar.

We are now taking a look at other options to make it (perhaps) easier or more practical for individual advocates to post items more directly than going through the WordPress Dashboard. Three options come to mind:

We were briefly—only briefly, mind you—impressed by the enhanced functionality in the truly wonderful Google Docs and Spreadsheets that enables you to create a document that you can publish from within Google Docs directly to WordPress or other blog publishing platforms. This involves configuring the “Publish > Blog Site Setting” within Google Docs to recognize either your hosted blog’s API or the URL to your blog’s call to the XML-RPC protocol (e.g., “http://www.yourdomain/wordpress/xmlrpc.php” for WordPress). It is a nice feature, and offers promise of better integration with other tools you can tap via your universal Google account. But it doesn’t integrate or support the “title” you would normally have for a WordPress post, and as good as it is the interface still needs work.

A second option we had fun playing with is the Performancing add-on for Firefox. This is pretty nice, actually, since the user can invoke the editor directly from within Firefox, compose and edit, and then post all in one swoop. And it supports “titles” and “categories.” Configuring this add-on is not particularly hard but it is noticeably less intuitive than Google Docs, especially if you need to manually configure the paths for making a “publishing” connection. For a manual configuration, if you don’t know to insert the path to your blog’s XML-RPC file, whew, you are soooooo screwed! But it offers great convenience because it is integrated into Firefox and can be invoked with one keystroke or click.

A third, and arguably the best option is Microsoft’s Live Writer Beta. Live Writer is a desktop application, so it’s use is limited to locations where the user has it installed. But it offers way more than any or all of the preceding options. Configuration is as it should be: To create a new “weblog” account all you need to do is enter the basic URL for your site (e.g., “http://www.webdogs.org/”), enter your blog login and password, and Live Writer just figures it out for you. How? Who cares. It just does. Once your publishing connection is set up, you can use Live Writer’s very familiar Word-style interface to compose, and you can do so in one of three different views: Normal (rich-text mode); Web Layout (rich-text mode displaying against a background that mimics your site’s design, illustrated below); and HTML Code (for the more geek inclined). Plus you can view a preview of your post in a display that mimics how it will appear at your site. Plus it smoothly supports both “titles” and “categories.” Plus it has a built-in spell checker. Plus … Plus … And more Plus. There’s a lot to like here.

Microsoft Live Writer interface in Web Layout view

Live Writer may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but for the Webdogs this may help ease the pain of bringing more contributors on board: Open Live Writer. Check. Compose using a pervasively familiar interface. Check. Click the publish button. Check. Now that is what we call making blog posting really easy.