INTERNET LEGAL RESEARCH WEEKLY
January 27, 2002
Tom
Mighell
Welcome to Issue #57 of the Internet Legal Research Weekly, a newsletter that delivers relevant and timely legal research information, and other fun stuff, to your inbox every Sunday. If you like what you read, please forward this newsletter to anyone you think might be interested, and encourage him or her to do the same! To subscribe, all you have to do is send an e-mail to ilrw-subscribe@topica.com. It’s free!
And away we go…..
Notable News
Supreme Court Briefs Online
Texas Supreme Court, that is – attorneys will be asked to submit electronic briefs, which will then be made available to the general public.Scirus Gets a Makeover
Science-specific search engine Scirus, which I reviewed in the October 21, 2001 issue of this Newsletter, is getting a facelift, making it more user-friendly.And To Think I Almost Bought One of those Bio-Hazard Alert Detectors…
To look at the McWhortle Enterprises, Inc. website, you’d never know it was a scam. But the SEC says it is, and they should know – the agency created the website to prove a point:
Search Engine Review -- WiseNutBack in the middle of last year, several new search engines debuted around the same time. We’ve already reviewed Vivisimo and Teoma – now it’s time for WiseNut, which was thought at the time to be a potential “Google Killer.” The interface is certainly clean and simple, like Google, and the number of pages indexed (over 1.5 million) is also pretty impressive. But is it a worthy substitute for Google? Let’s take a look under the hood.
WiseNut uses a relevance-ranking technology similar to Google’s PageRank. WiseNut recognizes the fundamental problem of search engines is that while a search engine might return documents with the words you’re looking for located on those pages, it might not return truly relevant results. WiseNut’s technology attempts to get around this problem, in part through the use of WiseGuides. A WiseGuide generates categories and subcategories (similar to Vivisimo) that are semantically related to the words in the query. These WiseGuides appear at the top of the search results, for easy reference.
Let’s give it a try. I tried an initial search for Enron, and came up with over 150,000 documents in the general search. If I were just looking for the main website, I could stop right there, because Enron Corporation is first on the list. However, I was also given nine WiseGuide categories, on topics such as Enron Wind, Enron Energy, Enron Corporation, Enron Field, Risk Management, and others. Each folder will tell you how many sites lie within it. If you want to conduct a new search based upon the keywords on one of the WiseGuide folders, just click on “search this”. Otherwise, clicking on the WiseGuide will open that folder up. I clicked on Enron Corporation, which provided me with four additional (but pretty useless) sites containing the term Enron. I got a lot further clicking on “search this”; I found 11 sites containing Enron Corporation, and some subcategory folders as well.
In the general results list, there are two nifty features you might want to try. First is the Sneak-A-Peek option, which allows you to actually view the web page inside of the search results, without having to actually go to that page. WiseNut will also let you know if other pages from that same site are available for viewing, and you can go straight to a page with links from that site only.
One downside to WiseNut is its almost complete lack of advanced search capabilities. Boolean searching is not available, although if you type multiple words into the query box WiseNut will search as if you placed an AND between each word. The closest WiseNut comes to advanced searching is WiseSearch, which simply allows you to search for ALL words, a particular phrase, or to exclude words from your search.
Give WiseNut a spin and let me know how you like it! If you’re using WiseNut currently,send me an e-mail and tell me what you like about this new search engine.
Help Desk
Weekly Computer Maintenance – Step #3:
The past few weeks I’ve been offering tips on the five things you should do every week to keep your computer in tip-top condition. Step #3 is RUN SCANDISK. The files on your computer are organized in groups called clusters; when you use those programs, the clusters can become linked
with clusters from other files, or just get lost from the other clusters. ScanDisk rearranges these clusters to where they should be in the first place. Just go to Start|Programs|Accessories|System Tools|Scandisk. Your computer will be happy you did it.Do you have a question about searching the Internet or your computer in general? Drop me an e-mail– I’ll post your question (don’t worry, I won’t use your real name) and try to get an answer for you!
Legally Relevant – Sites on the Internet
Gammel’s Laws of Texas
I’ll start off with a site for my Texas subscribers. H.P.N. Gammel’s “The Laws of Texas” has been digitized and maintained by the University of North Texas at Denton, Texas. This is a terrific place if you’re researching Texas law before 1900. You can find law in Texas all the way from Austin’s Colonization Laws of 1822 to the laws of the 25th Legislature, which convened in 1897.Intellectual Property Digital Library
Speaking of digitized libraries, this site presented by the World Intellectual Property Organization provides access to various intellectual property data collections. These collections include databases of the Patent Cooperation Treaty Gazette, Madrid (data on international applications and subsequent designations that have not yet been recorded in the international register of marks), and the Journal of Patent Associated Literature. You can create an account, which keeps a record of your search history, or enter the Library as a guest. The resources here are tremendous; I was able to find a Korean patent application for a Royal Jelly Collection Frame quickly and easily (whatever that is).Media Laws Search
Interested in finding Estonia’s Broadcasting Act? This is the place for you. The International Journalist’s Network’s goal is to provide an electronic collection of media laws from around the globe. So far, most of the laws appear to come from countries in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union; there’s news and other resources for Africa and Latin America, but the Latin American resources are in Spanish. I really like this site, but I think to be completely effective there
should be more countries represented.PeriStats
This site from the March of Dimes is just chock full of perinatal statistics at the state and county level. Just select a state to get started – choose a topic such as Risk Indicators, Births, Infant Deaths, or Population, and you’ll get various subtopics for each category. Then you can choose to compare that state’s data with another state or all of them. You can also download the “State at a Glance” in PDF format, and there’s a nice collection of related links you can explore. This is a great statistical resource.School Evaluation Services
Standard & Poor’s site looks a lot like the PeriStats home page – you first get a map of the United States, and you can select one of the states to learn more about schools in your area. Unfortunately, that’s where the comparison ends. Apparently, a state must “engage” Standard & Poor’s to evaluate its schools first, and so far only two states -- Michigan and Pennsylvania – have done some engaging. But the data for those two states – wow! S&P has data on so many things, it’s almost overwhelming. You can find out information on student attendance, testing scores, dropout rates, spending, return on resources, learning environment, school financing, demographics, and much more. And there’s an individual report for each school district. I hope more states sign up for this service, because it will be an invaluable resource once it contains more data.Finally, I got a great response to last week’s article on bookmark managers – here are some other sites suggested by readers:
Blink (suggested by Dean Kirby) – this site has undergone some changes since I reviewed the site last year – now the site is known as Blink Rewards, and it seems to give more attention to paying users to surf the Internet. However, the site still has a great bookmark manager, which Dean’s law firm uses as their Links page for their firm website. See Blink in action.
The Brain (suggested by Tom Kirkendall) is more complicated than I have time to talk about, but it’s an impressive product. WebBrain is an online search engine based on Netscape’s Open Directory Project, but if you want the bookmark manager you’ll have to download the program. It’s free for 30 days, but $79.95 to keep. With it you can organize lots of things, more than just your bookmarks – files, web pages, ideas. It looks like a pretty impressive utility.
Thanks for the suggestions, folks!
Well, that’s it for Issue #57 – I hope you liked it! If you did, pass this along to anyone you think might be interested, and encourage him or her to subscribe. Also, feel free to drop me an e-mail any time if you have questions, or if you have websites or other topics you want included in a future issue.
Tom Mighell
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