Beyond Google and Yahoo: Advanced Search
Tom Mighell Cowles & Thompson, P.C. Dallas, TX
Fort Worth Paralegal Association January 25, 2007
Beyond Google and Yahoo: Advanced Search Introduction It was only a few years ago that I was giving presentations on Internet research and asking, "How many of you are using Google? Two? Three? Well, you should all be using this terrific search engine -- it's the best way to find information on the Internet." Back then, it was true -- search engines like Google and Yahoo! were the go-to services for your legal research. While they remain extremely valuable, and maintain an important place in a researcher's toolkit, Web search tools have become more numerous, varied, and focused on specific topics, content, and even locations. This makes it both easier and more difficult to make the right decision in choosing search-related services and applications. In this article, I’ll review and recommend services, strategies, and resources to help you locate the information you want and need, in less time and using a more precise process.
Articles and Periodical Literature. We often want to obtain copies of articles of which we have been told, heard about, or seen referenced in other sources that are specific to our requirements. Using one of several sites that allow users to query large databases of articles and periodical literature is often the path of least resistance to this information. I recommend that you try all of the following sites, each of which offer field searching to limit requests by date, author, subject, phrase, and publication. • • •
FindArticles (http://www.findarticles.com) HighBeam (http://www.highbeam.com) MagPortal (http://www.magportal.com)
Bilingual Search – Babelplex (http://www.babelplex.com) is a nifty tool that takes your search and translates it into eight different languages – you get a split screen of Google results, with English results on the left and your translated results on the right.
Blog Search. The “blogosphere” is now considered to be a fantastic source of information, and can often be as (or more) up-to-date on breaking news as some of the news sites mentioned in this article. There are also tools available to search RSS feeds, or to create RSS feeds that literally “deliver” the research to you. Here are a few of our favorites: •
Blogdigger (http://www.blogdigger.com) – you can create an RSS feed to monitor your searches here.
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Blogstreet (http://www.blogstreet.com)
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Daypop (http://www.daypop.com)
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Fagan Finder Weblogs & RSS Search (http://www.faganfinder.com/blogs)
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Feedster (http://www.feedster.com) – news, blogs, and podcasts
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Google Blog Search (http://blogsearch.google.com)
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Gigablast (http://blogs.gigablast.com) – currently indexing over 10 billion pages.
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NewsTrove (http://www.newstrove.com) – filtered news from reliable sources
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PubSub (http://www.pubsub.com) – create RSS feeds on the topics of your choice.
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RocketNews (http://www.rocketnews.com) – billed as the “RSS Search Company.”
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Technorati (http://www.technorati.com) – currently monitoring over 28 million weblogs.
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Yahoo Blog Search – Yahoo’s product doesn’t have its own page; interestingly, it’s included in a box as part of the Yahoo News search results. Arguably, this is where blog search results should be.
Business Publications -- BPubs.com (http://www.bpubs.com) is a search engine for business publications. You can browse categories ranging from Economics to SOHO and Small Business, or search this collection of articles and publications. Another interesting search tool is SMEALSearch (http://smealsearch2.psu.edu), from the Smeal College of Business at Penn State University. It focuses entirely on academic business documents, and crawls websites of academia, commerce, research institutes, and government agencies for relevant documents.
Copyright Search – want to see if someone is copying your firm web site? Just plug your URL into Copyscape (http://www.copyscape.com), and it will search for instances of copyright infringement on the Web. If instead you want to search the entire Copyright Law of the U.S., you might try the askSam Searchable e-Book (http://www.asksam.com/ebooks/Copyright/). In fact, there are a number of free, searchable databases of legal opinions and various legal documents at the AskSam (http://www.asksam.com/ebooks) site.
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Directories. These sites have professionally indexed, reviewed and annotated content: •
CEOExpress (http://www.ceoexpress.com)
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Infomine (http://www.infomine.com) -- a virtual library of Internet resources relevant to faculty, students, and research staff at the university level. It contains useful Internet resources such as databases, electronic journals, electronic books, bulletin boards, mailing lists, online library card catalogs, articles, directories of researchers, and many other types of information.
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Internet Public Library (http://www.ipl.org) – The IPL's own collections of over 40,000 Internet resources, handpicked, organized and described by librarians and library students.
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Librarians' Index to the Internet (http://lii.org) -- From the Library of California, the site's motto is "Information You Can Trust." A directory of "Internet resources selected and evaluated by librarians for their usefulness to users of public libraries."
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SOSIG (Social Science Information Gateway) (http://www.sosig.ac.uk/) -- Your “Guide to the Best of the Web for Social Science.” The service aims to provide a trusted source of selected, high quality Internet information for researchers and practitioners in the social sciences, business, and law.
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Wall Street Executive Library (http://www.executivelibrary.com)
Discussion Search. Often, valuable information is found in the discussions that take place on the thousands of messages boards scattered across the Internet. Omgili (http://omgili.com) purports to search these spaces, and bring back results solely from Web-based discussion forums.
Foreign/International Search Tools. Here are a few tools that will help you find news and information from around the world. •
BBC News (http://news.bbc.co.uk) – content is organized by topic and provides related RSS feeds.
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Financial Times (http://www.ft.com) – free and fee-based services; RSS feeds and email updates available.
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MSN Newsbot UK (http://uk.newsbot.msn.com)
Government Search. There are a number of good tools that will search only government sites for you – this is a great way to focus your government research. Beyond Google and Yahoo: Advanced Search January 25, 2007
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Clusty Government Search (http://gov.clusty.com) – Clusty is putting its terrific clustering technology (see Meta-Search Tools, below) to work for government sites. It organizes your search results into folders that make it easy to find more specific information.
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FirstGovSearch (http://firstgovsearch.gov) – a companion to the FirstGov government directory, this site indexes over 40 million federal, state, tribal, and territorial government resources. It uses MSN for its search results, but also uses Vivisimo (which powers the Clusty tool, above) to provide clustered results in a sidebar.
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Gigablast Government Search (http://gov.gigablast.com) – currently indexing more than 34 million state and federal government pages.
In addition to search engines, I recommend the following sites for accessing current government information and Congressional proceedings. •
CapitolHearings.org (http://www.capitolhearings.org)
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CQ Politics (http://www.cqpolitics.com)
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C-Span (http://www.cspan.org) – offers searchable database of audio and video streams from the online library, as well as podcasts.
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GovTrack (http://www.govtrack.us) – offers e-mail updates and RSS feeds
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Thomas (http://thomas.loc.gov)
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USCongress.com (http://www.uscongress.com)
Health and Science – the number of health and science search tools have increased dramatically over the past year or so. Sites like these can be invaluable to the legal researcher, who often needs to find medical or science-related information. •
Entrez, Life Sciences Search Engine (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/gquery) – a service of the National Institutes of Health, this is a terrific cross-database search page. It will take your search query and look in PubMed, genome, protein, and nucleotide databases, cancer libraries, chemical databases, and much more.
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Healthline (http://www.healthline.com) – a relatively new health search engine. This site is interesting because it offers links to broaden or narrow your search, and its HealthMaps feature provides a neat map of particular medical conditions, with links to symptoms, prevention, diagnosis, treatment, and related items.
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Ojose (http://www.ojose.com) – this is short for Online Journals Search Engine, “where science meets the web.” Like Entrez, this tool allows you to search across more than 60 different databases for scientific publications (journals, articles, research reports, books, etc.) from one search box.
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OmniMedicalSearch (http://www.omnimedicalsearch.com) – actually a meta-search tool, with this site you can search up to 16+ different medical search engines. You can also run searches on medical news and images.
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Public Library of Science (http://www.plos.org) -- advocates the free distribution of science and medical published articles.
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Scirus (http://www.scirus.com) – this site has been around for a long time, and it’s still one of the best science search engines around. It searches over 200 million sciencespecific web pages.
Job Search – Indeed (http://www.indeed.com) is a great new search engine that aggregates job search results from job sites, newspapers, associates, and company career pages. It’s posting nearly a million new jobs every week. Meta-Search Tools – meta-search sites have been around for some time. They have advantages and disadvantages over regular search engines. The main advantage is of a metasearch tool is that it searches across multiple search engines, and brings back the best of all of them – you don’t have to enter your query at each individual search engine. The primary disadvantage of such tools is that you cannot take advantage of the advanced search features of the individual search engines; you pretty much have to accept the results you get. Here are some of the newest meta-search tools to check out: •
Clusty (http://clusty.com) – Clusty isn’t really new, but it’s still Tom’s favorite metasearch tool. Clusty takes your search results and places them in cluster-like folders, to make it easy for you to quickly narrow your search.
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PreviewSeek (http://www.previewseek.com) – billing itself as “the world’s most advanced search engine,” PreviewSeek is really a meta-search tool. It aggregates results much like Clusty, with folders that allow you to further refine your query. Some searches will return a green box with a brief encyclopedia-like description of the term, with links to searches on related terms.
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TurboScout (http://www.turboscout.com) – this is more of a search aggregator; once you enter your search terms, you can use one of dozens of search engines directly from this site. Instead of hopping from engine to engine, just click on a new engine, and you’ll get the results from that particular site.
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whonu.com (http://www.whonu.com) – not a search engine, but a tool for maximizing the power of existing search engines. What whonu does very well is help create advanced queries for you, at hundreds of different search sites.
If some of these new ones don’t grab you, try one of these tried-and-true meta-search tools: •
Dogpile (http://www.dogpile.com)
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Excite (http://www.excite.com)
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IceRocket (http://www.icerocket.com)
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Ixquick (http://www.ixquick.com)
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MetaCrawler (http://www.metacrawler.com)
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ProFusion (http://www.profusion.com)
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SurfWax (http://www.surfwax.com)
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Web’s Biggest (http://www.websbiggest.com)
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Vivisimo (http://www.vivisimo.com)
Mobile Search – the ability to search from your mobile device is getting a lot more attention lately, and Google and Yahoo both have pretty nice mobile search offerings (see below). An intriguing alternative is Gada.be (http://gada.be), where your search query is the URL. Just type http://searchterms.gada.be, and the page that returns contains the results for your query. News Search. Using Google to search for information on the latest news is no good, because the search engine doesn't update its links fast enough. Instead, you need a news search service that provides access to stories minutes after they are posted on the web. Some of our favorite news search providers include: •
All Headline News (http://www.allheadlinenews.com)
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Findory (http://www.findory.com) -- this site is interesting in that it tries to "learn" about the news you want to find. As you click on new stories, Findory learns more about your interests, and suggests news stories based on your reading history.
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Google News (http://news.google.com) -- one of the first, and still a great site. Searches over 4,500 news sources. You can also set up alerts to notify you by e-mail when new stories appear on your subject of interest.
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Inform.com (http://www.inform.com) – Inform allows you to create customized “Discovery Paths” for just about any topic imaginable, and you can save your searches for future review.
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Jurist (http://jurist.law.pitt.edu) – annotated, reliable links to current legal news and documents.
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MarketWatch.com (http://www.marketwatch.com)
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Market Wire (http://www.marketwire.com)
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Moreover (http://w.moreover.com/categories/category_list.html) – choose to obtain updates from a range of pre-built topical categories.
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News Search Portal (http://www.nieuwsbronnen.com/newssearchportal)
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Newsvine (http://www.newsvine.com) – a brand-new site, and as of this writing available only by invitation. You can use Newsvine just to read the news – there are thousands of stories from the AP, ESPN, and other sources. You can also keep track of all your searches by setting up RSS feeds for them. Newsvine also allows its users to write their own news columns, comment on the news, and “seed” the content with news from other sites.
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NPR News (http://www.npr.org)
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PR Newswire (http://www.prnewswire.com)
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Topix (http://www.topix.net) -- one of the great newcomers, Topix offers news on "360,000 Topix." Each news topic features its own RSS feed, so you can follow the latest news without returning to the site.
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Wall Street Journal Free Features (http://online.wsj.com/public/page/2_0323.html) – review daily for a range of articles chosen from the fee-based subscription portion of the paper.
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Yahoo News (http://news.yahoo.com) -- this is still the most popular news site on the Internet, in terms of traffic. In addition to e-mail alerts, you can also sign up to receive notification by RSS when new stories are published.
To compare the features of the new “Web 2.0” news search sites mentioned above (and others), check out the chart at TinFinger (http://snipurl.com/mpdb).
People Finders. Although these two sites aren’t free, they are terrific at finding people and companies, and lots of detailed information about them. Be sure to use them in combination with other free and fee-based sources. Beyond Google and Yahoo: Advanced Search January 25, 2007
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Accurint (http://www.accurint.com)
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AutoTrackXP (http://www.atxp.com)
Podcast Search Engines. Podcasting is quickly becoming a great source of valuable information to lawyers and other legal researchers. Unfortunately, the tools available to search these audio files are not as sophisticated as we would like. But they’re getting there. Here are two for you to consider: •
Podscope (http://www.podscope.com) – Podscope listens to podcasts and indexes the words found in them. You can listen to a snippet of the recording in your search results, visit the site where the audio resides, and even subscribe to an RSS feed that will alert you when other podcasts are recorded with those particular search terms.
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Podzinger (http://www.podzinger.com) – in my opinion the best of the podcast search tools. Podzinger users voice recognition technology to transcribe each podcast, so you can go directly to the point in a podcast where your search terms are spoken.
Public Records Search – searching for public records is not an easy process, because the actual records generally reside in a database that is often hidden from traditional search engines. Pretrieve (http://www.pretrieve.com) can’t retrieve the actual documents for you, but it can get you pretty close. Just run a search on a person, place, or address, and you’ll get listings to public record sites. When you click to a site, Pretrieve will take you to that search page, and many times will actually perform the search for you. Another great public records site is Search Systems (http://www.searchsystems.net), which provides access to over 35,591 searchable public records databases, most of them free.
RSS Search. Many sites now utilize RSS feeds to distribute information, so users don’t have to visit the site every day to find information. These RSS feeds can also be searched, and ScoopGo (http://www.scoopgo.com) is a tool that helps you do that. With ScoopGo you can create your own “Scoops” that will search through the RSS feeds you choose. For example, you can create a “News Scoop” with RSS feeds from CNN, Reuters, the BBC, or other news sources that have RSS feeds. Then you can use your Scoop to search these aggregated feeds all at once.
Search Engines with Interesting Features
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Brainboost (http://www.brainboost.com) – go ahead, just ask Brainboost a question, like “what’s the prime interest rate?” This site is interested in answering your question, so you shouldn’t see a search result that doesn’t feature an answer.
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Exalead (http://www.exalead.com) – this fantastic search engine from France has some great features; one of our favorites is the information on the left menu bar of your search results. You can narrow your search by Related Terms, Related Categories, Location of Website, Document Type, and Document Language, among others.
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Factbites (http://www.factbites.com) – listed as the place “where results make sense,” Factbites’ aim is to provide search results to you in context, so you can see exactly how your search terms appear on the results page. The search results are geared to offer meaningful, relevant sentences from every site in the search results.
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JetEye (http://www.jeteye.com) – as search engines go, JetEye is not all that special. However, you can take your search results and package them up in a “Jetpak” that you can then e-mail to others. Even better, these Jetpaks are themselves searchable, meaning you can keep coming back to them to mine additional information.
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Rollyo (http://www.rollyo.com) – Rollyo is not exactly a search engine, but it’s one of the most remarkable sites mentioned in this article. At Rollyo, you can “roll your own search.” You can specify up to 25 separate web sites that make up your own personal search engine; then you can search those sites and those sites only. If you have a certain number of regular sites that you visit for information, this is a terrific way to regularly search them all at once.
Vertical Search Tools -- LookSmart recently debuted a new vertical search feature (http://search.looksmart.com) that allows you to customize search results and content, by topic. There are 161 search engines here, in topics such as Autos, Cities, Education, Health, Money, Tech and Games, and Travel.
Video Search – as more and more video comes online, tools to search video content are slowly developing. As you might imagine, both Google and Yahoo have their own video search tools; here are some others to check out. •
BlinxTV (http://www.blinx.tv) – search over 1,000,000 hours of television and video here.
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Truveo (http://www.truveo.com) – now a part of AOL, you can search or browse for video items.
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Web Site Trackers. It’s hard to keep up with all the new information that shows up on the web sites you follow. If a particular web site doesn’t provide e-mail or RSS alerts, maybe using a web site tracker will help. These tools alert you when there are specific changes to web pages with content of interest to you. Use one or more to supplement your ongoing research projects. •
Change Detection (http://www.changedetection.com)
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Copernic Agent (http://www.copernic.com)
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TracerLock (http://www.tracerlock.com)
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Web2Mail (http://www.web2mail.com)
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Web Site Watcher (http://aignes.com)
Advanced Searching Using Google and Yahoo All right, so I couldn't get through this entire article without mentioning Google or Yahoo. There's no question that they offer some terrific services for finding information on the Internet; indeed, there's always a sense of one-upsmanship going on between the two competitors. Their competition is all the better for us researchers. Here are some of the best features of both Google and Yahoo, some of which you may not know about: •
Advanced Search. Both Google (http://www.google.com/advanced_search) and Yahoo! (http://myweb2.search.yahoo.com/web/advanced?ei=UTF-8) offer “Advanced Search” pages, which allow you to construct detailed, intricate searches designed to produce focused results. These pages let you restrict your search to particular words or phrases, specific domains, file formats, countries, date ranges, and even content. If you don’t feel like using the Advanced features, there are Google Cheat Sheets (http://www.google.com/help/cheatsheet.html and http://www.googleguide.com/advanced_operators_reference.html) to help you formulate your queries.
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Alerts (Google, Yahoo!) – Google (http://www.google.com/alerts) will send you an email whenever your search terms appear in its search engine or news search. Yahoo! (http://alerts.yahoo.com) offers even more options for alert services.
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Book Search (http://books.google.com) – Google’s new book search is somewhat controversial, but very helpful; you can search the full text of books that Google has digitized and placed online.
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Shortcuts. Google (http://www.google.com/help/features.html) and Yahoo (http://tools.search.yahoo.com/shortcuts/) both offer dozens of handy shortcuts that provide nearly instant information on a range of categories. Here are some of them:
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Area Code (Google, Yahoo!) – just typing in an area code will show you where it’s located.
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Calculator (Google, Yahoo!) – good for simple calculations.
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Currency Conversion (Google, Yahoo!) – easily converts any unit of currency.
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Definitions (Google, Yahoo!) – just type define and a word, and you’ll get a dictionary definition.
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Encyclopedia (Yahoo!) – type facts and the topic you’re searching for a Columbia Encyclopedia entry.
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Flight Tracker (Google, Yahoo!) – typing in the airline and flight number will take you to links that allow you to track the flight.
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Gas Prices (Yahoo!) – find prices in your area by typing gas and your zip code.
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Hotels (Yahoo!) – hotels and any location will show reviews and locations for recommended hotels.
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ISBN Numbers (Yahoo!) – to find the best price on any book, just enter the ISBN number.
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Package Tracking (Google, Yahoo!) – enter the tracking number for any UPS, FedEx, or USPS package to retrieve the tracking history.
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Patents (Yahoo!) – entering patent and the patent number will retrieve detailed information on that patent.
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Phone Book (Google) – just type in the name and location of a person, and you’ll receive their address and phone number, if available.
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Sports Scores (Yahoo!) – just enter your favorite pro team and scores for scores from recent games.
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Stock Quotes (Google, Yahoo!) – the stock ticker symbol will retrieve recent results for that company.
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Traffic Reports (Yahoo!) – enter traffic and the city for a link to current traffic conditions.
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UPC Codes (Google, Yahoo!) – to find detailed product information, just enter its UPC code.
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VIN Information (Google, Yahoo!) – entering the vehicle identification number will take you to a site that allows you to check that car’s history.
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Weather (Google, Yahoo!) – weather and the city or zip code will provide current conditions for the area.
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Zip Code (Google, Yahoo!) – in Google, typing in a zip code will take you to a map of the area. In Yahoo! it will take you to the city guide for that zip code.
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Local Search – local search is hot these days; the ability to find information that’s close to home is becoming increasingly important. Both Google (http://local.google.com) and Yahoo! (http://local.yahoo.com) have excellent local search tools.
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Maps – until recently, Google Maps (http://maps.google.com) was the mapping site to beat. Recently, Yahoo! launched a new version of its map service (http://maps.yahoo.com/beta/index.php). Google has gone one step further with its Google Earth (http://earth.google.com) software; this free, downloadable program is very powerful, and has great applications for lawyers who need to demonstrate map locations at a hearing or at trial.
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Mobile Search – Google (http://mobile.google.com) offers two types of mobile search. One is to just go to http://www.google.com in your phone’s web browser. If you don’t want to deal with surfing the Internet, then just send your search query as a text message to 46645 (GOOGL); in a few seconds your search results will appear as a reply text message. Yahoo (http://mobile.yahoo.com) has similar services, but the text message number is 92466 (YAHOO).
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Translation (http://www.google.com/translate_t) -- Google will translate any web page for you, as long as it’s in Spanish, French, German, Italian or Portuguese.
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Help! Both Google and Yahoo! offer so many features, it’s easy to get overwhelmed. Fortunately, they also both offer a terrific help sections (http://www.google.com/support and http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/). These pages will help you understand your search results, and how to better use the search engine.
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Personalized Search (http://www.google.com/psearch) – when you are signed in to your Google account, Google keeps track of all your searches, and then orders your search results based on what you’ve searched for in the past. Yahoo’s My Web (http://myweb2.search.yahoo.com) offers the same type of personalization.
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Side-by-Side Search – there are a number of sites that allow you to compare the results between Google and Yahoo, and Twingine (http://twingine.com) is one of those sites. Just plug in your search terms, and you’ll receive a split-screen layout of your results in both Google/Yahoo.
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Video Search – at Google (http://video.google.com) – you can search for thousands of videos, and download movies and television shows for a small fee. Yahoo (http://video.search.yahoo.com) has a video search service, too.
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Yahoo Creative Commons Search (http://search.yahoo.com/cc) – restricts your search to pages that have been licensed by Creative Commons.
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Yahoo Open Shortcuts (http://shortcuts.search.yahoo.com/) – use custom keywords to create your own searches, or start tasks from within Yahoo.
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Yahoo Subscription Search (http://search.yahoo.com/subscriptions) – search content from Consumer Reports, Factiva, LexisNexis, the New England Journal of Medicine, and other premium resources. You’ll ultimately have to pay to access the content.
Toolbars. Do you use a search engine toolbar to more efficiently access your favorite search engine? If not, what are you waiting for? Toolbars save you tons of time in getting to your search results, and most of them have additional useful features. Here are our favorites, and some new offerings: •
Yahoo Toolbar (http://toolbar.yahoo.com) – offers a spyware blocker, access to your Yahoo mail, and many other great features.
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Google Toolbar (http://toolbar.google.com) – offers many of the same great features as the Google web site, but in a toolbar.
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Exalead (http://corporate.exalead.com/enterprise/l=en?p=utiliser)
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LexisNexis (http://www.lexisnexis.com/toolbar) -- note: this is for those who already have a subscription to the LexisNexis service.
Tom Mighell is Senior Counsel and Litigation Technology Support Coordinator at Cowles & Thompson in Dallas. He is a frequent speaker and writer on the Internet and legal technology issues. He has published the Internet Legal Research Weekly newsletter since 2000, and the Internet research weblog Inter Alia (http://www.inter-alia.net) since 2002. He is also a contributor to the blog Between Lawyers (http://www.corante.com/betweenlawyers). He is a member of the 2007 ABA TECHSHOW Planning Board, and of the ABA Law Practice Management Section’s Council. He received both his B.A. and J.D. degrees from the University of Texas at Austin.
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