New Google Blog Search and Finding a Lawyer Blawg with Google, MSN and Yahoo!
Searching for a law-oriented web log (or "blog") is not a straight-forward process. The standard search engines offer a number of different ways to locate a blog, which we will compare with the new Google Blog Search that came out today.
To show you how to track down a blog, let's continue from yesterday's post on the Supreme Court. I'll run a number of searches for blogs on the Supreme Court and compare the results.
Google / Yahoo! / MSN - Supreme Court Blog
First, I ran a search for supreme court blog on Google, Yahoo! and MSN. The two top contenders among the search results are SCOTUSblog and Supreme Court Blog.
I've summarized the results in the table below.
| Web Site | Google Rank | Yahoo! Rank | MSN Rank |
| SCOTUSblog | #1, #5, #6 | #2, #7 | #7, #10 |
| Supreme Court Blog | #2, #3 | #1, #4 | #1, #2 |
SCOTUSblog ranked higher on Google, while Supreme Court Blog ranked higher on Yahoo! and MSN. However, when reviewing the two web sites, I noticed that the posts on SCOTUSblog, which is sponsored by Goldstein & Howe, P.C., were more up-to-date and relevant. SCOTUSblog is currently covering the nomination hearings of Chief Justice nominee John Roberts, Jr.
Supreme Court Blog, on the other hand, includes only 2 posts from 2005, both on Supreme Court figurines and bobbleheads. The blog does include more substantive commentary, but these are from October of 2004. Overall, not quite befitting its #1 ranking on Yahoo! and MSN.
Google - RSS Search
Next, I ran a search for supreme court but limited the results to rss feeds by adding filetype:rss to the search term. The theory behind this is that blogs often offer an rss feed of their posts. However, the results from this search were not particularly fruitful.
MSN - Feed Search
MSN also offers a feed search. To specify a feed search, I added feed: before my search term (e.g., feed:"supreme court"). As you can see below, MSN returned a mix of news feeds and blog feeds.
Finally, I tested Google's recently unveiled Google Blog Search.
I ran a search for supreme court using Google Blog Search. As you can see from these results, Google Blog Search returns blog postings that match your search terms. You can also sort these results by relevance and by date. So, if you are looking for a blog on a particular topic, stick with the regular Google search. If you are looking for a blog posting on a particular topic, try out the new Google Blog Search.
A few notes about the Google Blog Search from Tim
- You can find Google Blog Search at http://blogsearch.google.com or for those who would like a blogger look and feel the url is: http://search.blogger.com/
- There is a Google Blog Search FAQ here: http://www.google.com/help/about_blogsearch.html
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Google Blog Search only searches the feeds, not the sites
If you want your full post indexed, you need to setup an RSS 2.0 or ATOM feed with the full post text (this is relatively easy to do, although many Blawgers are not currently doing it)// -
You can Ping your Blog post to Google using current services
If you want Google Blog Search to index your blog make sure to ping weblogs.com or blo.gs. You can set this up in your software, or
you can do it manually (or by way of a bookmark that is reloaded) at http://pingomatic.com/
and note: you can also automatically use pingomatic.com, which pings a bunch of sites, by adding in http://rpc.pingomatic.com/ as a URL to ping in your blog software - Not Just Blogs are Indexed Google Blog Search actually indexes more than blogs, it also indexes RSS and ATOM feeds from news papers and any other site that is updated regularly (eg non-blogs like http://auto-recalls.justia.com :).
- Read more information about Google's Google Blog Search at Search Engine Watch or the Google Blog, or just do a Google Blog Search on "Google Blog Search".
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Research Tips for Finding Information Hidden from the Major Search Engines
Google proudly displays the number of web pages contained within its index. At 8 billion pages and counting, this potentially represents an immense quantity of useful information. Indeed, Google is well suited for finding all sorts of arcane trivia tucked into the many recesses of the web.
However, web researchers already recognize that the quantity of data is only one factor. If the information you are searching for is not within one of the 8 billion pages in Google's index, you're out of luck.
For example, let's look at securities filings. Google surprisingly returns Canada's SEDAR as the first result (gasp!) and the SEC's EDGAR as the second result. Sacre bleu! Despite French protestations, it turns out that the Internet really is a tool for foisting Canadian (and not American) values and culture onto the world. :-)
All kidding aside, while Google will point you to the SEC's web site, this only represents a first albeit incomplete step since the contents of the securities filings are not included in the Google index. This is true even though these securities filings are freely accessible online and are not sequestered in a password-protected section of the web site. So, you cannot search for every mention of a particular executive within a company's securities filings through Google. However, the fault for this omission lies with the SEC and not with Google, Yahoo or MSN. For some reason, the SEC has set-up a robots.txt file to hide securities filings and other files from search engines. Unfortunately, this effectively banishes securities filings to the Deep Web. So, on one hand, the SEC promotes the disclosure of important corporate data to investors; however, on the other hand, the SEC itself hides the disclosures it receives from the search engines - the usual way people go about finding information.
That's why when I searched for berkshire hathaway securities filings, Google returned the copies from Hoover's Online, and the SEC's own copies are no where to be found. Unfortunately, Hoover's also blocks search engines from indexing the contents of its securities filings as well. So, Google can tell you that Hoover's Online has a copy of Berkshire Hathaway's securities filings, but cannot tell you what is inside them.
As a result, researchers have to go through the circuitous route of looking through each individual securities filing to track down the information they need or pay one of the subscription services which offers the ability to conduct full-text searches of securities filings. For those only interested in material contracts, Onecle has extracted thousands of business contracts from securities filings and these are all freely accessible, as well as searchable from Google.
In other search engine news, this week, Yahoo! announced Yahoo! Search Subscriptions - a new service for searching through subscription content. While Yahoo! Search Subscriptions is currently only configured to search through Consumer Reports, Forrester Research, FT.com, IEEE, the New England Journal of Medicine, TheStreet.com and the Wall Street Journal right now, Yahoo! states that its search engine will add Lexis-Nexis and other subscription content at a later time. Let's see how well this new service works so far by using three different approaches to locate Kozlowski in the Wall Street Journal.
Using Google, a search for Kozlowski on the Wall Street Journal site returns 6 results.
If I run the same search using Yahoo! Search Subscriptions, I get 20 matching results. Interestingly, if I ran a search for Kozlowski using the regular Yahoo! Search instead of Yahoo! Search Subscriptions, I only get back 2 matching results from the Wall Street Journal.
The final test is running a search for Kozlowski on the Wall Street Journal site itself. And the winner is...the Wall Street Journal with 120 matching results. This shows you how much content still remains out-of-reach of the major search engines. Google may have over 8 billion web pages stored in its index, but it isn't omniscient (yet). Not by a long shot!
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Yahoo! Web Search of Creative Commons Licensed Documents
Hi Friends,
Yahoo! has released a Creative Commons Web search cut of their Web search that limits itself to content that has a Creative Commons license (they basically filter their results by looking for the license codes on the indexed Web pages).
This Yahoo! Creative Commons Web search is in addition to the original beta Creative Commons Licensed Content Search on the Creative Commons site.
More info on the Yahoo! Creative Commons Search can be found on the Yahoo! Search Blog and you can find a note and comments on Lessig's blog.
The Yahoo! search seems to return an order of magnitude (10x) the number of results that the original Creative Commons search returned.
And the law firm marketing spin? You can limit the search to documents you can use for commercial purposes, so there may be some law firm Web site content out there you can use :)
Peace - Tim
:: Hand of Fate, Black and Blue by The Rolling Stones
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Overture's Ted Meisel says MSN will probably not to renew deal with Overture for search ads
Hi Friends,
Ted Meisel, who runs Yahoo!'s Overture Services (as well as being a lawyer from Stanford :) told Adweek that he expects Microsoft not to renew their deal with Overture to supply search ads to MSN. The current deal runs through June 2006.
This is not really a surprise, as Microsoft has been hiring many people of late to focus on a paid search product for the new MSN Search. And in the brand arena, Yahoo!'s Overture, division is changing its name to Yahoo! Search Marketing Solutions. Having the Yahoo! brand selling paid search placement on MSN would not be good for Microsoft, although Yahoo! would probably have maintained the Overture brand longer had they been able to renew the Overture - MSN deal.
For those with a lot of $ to spend MSN is already selling search related ads directly to clients who spend more than $75,000 per year with their MSN Featured Sites product. And for a few million a year, you can probably get your link on the MSN home page (it looks like the lawyer directory link space has opened up).
In any case, for most firms it will just lead to one more setup of search terms for search advertisers, and one more system to track. Hopefully MSN will design their paid search fulfillment system to be like Google's AdWords, and not Overture's user unfriendly system. Better still would be for Overture to change their fulfillment system to be more like Google's AdWords. But more on that when I compare Google and Overture services in a later how-to post...
Peace - Tim
:: Turn to Stone, So What by Joe Walsh
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Yahoo! Toolbar Beta for Mozilla Firefox Browser
Hi Friends,
Yahoo! has released a beta version of their toolbar for Firefox, if you run Windows.
A Macintosh version should be out soon (you can get an email from Yahoo! when the Mac (or Linux) version is ready by clicking here).
You can read more about the Yahoo! Firefox tool bar on the Yahoo! Search blog.
The main value I see (for me at least) is being able to add RSS feeds into MyYahoo! And the Yahoo! Firefox toolbar also has the AltaVista Babelfish "Translate This Page" functionality.
Once it is out for the Mac, I will add it to my Firefox browser (along with my other Firefox extensions, GoogleBar, the unofficial Google Toolbar for Mozilla and my A9 Firefox toolbar). And I can hardly wait for the MSN Search Firefox toolbar for the Macintosh.
Peace - Tim
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Welcome to the Justia Legal Marketing Blog
Hi Friends,
Welcome to Justia's Legal SEO Blog. On this blog we will comment on the Internet and legal marketing industries, as well as introduce new Justia features and services.
We would like to thank Kevin O'Keefe of LexBlog for helping us set up our own Marketing Blog.
Have a great day!
Peace,
Tim
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