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Welcome to Issue #132 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 visit Inter Alia and fill out the subscription form -- it's free!

This month's twenty questions
Howard Bashman at How Appealing has another installation of "Twenty Questions for the Appellate Judge," this one featuring Senior Circuit Judge Richard Arnold of the Eighth Circuit. As always, a great read.

A tour of the nation's judiciary -- page by page
TheJudiciary.org has put together a slide show of judiciary home pages from each state, with commentary on the design and usability of each site.

Searching *** asterisks
This month's Online Magazine has a great article from Greg Notess on Unusual Power Web Searching Commands, including using asterisks to enable proximity searching in Google (among other things).

Top Business Research Sites
Washington Researchers, a company specializing in business and competitive intelligence research, offers a page of top Internet sites for business research, including a brief explanation on determining the quality of websites.

Better than a live editor?
When Google News debuted last year, news rating service Newsknife questioned whether it would perform better than news sites with life editors. After a year, the site reports that live editors still pick the top stories most often. The survey found that Google News picked the top stories 63% of the time, versus 77% for live editors. Seems to me it should be lot higher for the human being, don't you think?

Search without opening a browser
If you can't wait to open a browser to conduct an Internet search, Google feels your pain. This week it introduced the Google Deskbar, which installs on your taskbar, allowing you to enter searches at the desktop level.

Blawgs of the Week
A whole new crop of law-related weblogs for you to peruse this week: An Oasis is written by Paul, a first year law and politics student at Edinburgh Law School. The Bradley Huggins Consulting Group has been running the Law Firm Management News since June, with news, advice, and commentary for managing partners, legal administrators, and other legal management professionals. Who is behind the Texas Law Blog? There are so few Texas blawgers -- I'd like to know who it is who is providing us with information from "the United States Supreme Court, 5th Circuit, Texas Supreme Court, Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, the various Courts of Appeals, the Texas Legislature, major Texas newspapers and legal websites." Great information! Trials and Tribulations features "a trial lawyer's commentary on his cases, significant legal developments and occasionally, life in general." Christopher Cross, a Los Angeles law student who by his own admission should be studying, is instead publishing Legal XXX, which is "not as dirty as it sounds."

Meta-Crawling

From time to time I like to review an Internet search tool, to make sure that this newsletter doesn't get *too* Google-centric. This week we're talking about MetaCrawler, the meta-search site. MetaCrawler (MC) recently benefited from a major facelift, and the site is clean and uncomplicated. MC is owned by Infospace, which also owns Dogpile and Webcrawler). Take a look at all three sites -- anything look similar to you?

No matter -- today, we focus on MetaCrawler. You are given three options -- Web Search, Yellow Pages, and White Pages. The Web Search option allows you to narrow your search for Web Pages, Images, Audio, Multimedia, News, and Shopping. The phone book functions seem to work pretty well, so we won't talk about them here. The Web Pages function searches Google, About.com, Yahoo, Ask Jeeves, Overture, FindWhat, LookSmart, AltaVista, and FAST Search. MC says it queries "many more" search engines, but I couldn't find that list anywhere -- you can find out the other search engines when you run a search. They include Teoma, Search Partner Network, Inktomi, ah-ha, Internet Picks, and Kanoodle.

A search for "internet access tax" brought up 82 results, when viewed by relevance. You can also change to "view by search engine," which interestingly changed the outcome to 99 results. A nice feature MC has added is the ability to review your results by more focused categories, organized to the left of the search results. For this particular search, the categories included "Moratorium, House," Business, "House Passes," "Exempted, Governors Oppose," Resources, and more. This is a great tool that gives you the potential ability to greatly narrow your search focus. MC also offers a spelling correction utility, but it didn't catch many of the spelling errors I tried. MC also has an Advanced Search page, which allows you to qualify your search, use Boolean search terms, limit your search to a certain date range, use domain or adult filters, and customize your layout preferences.

Like many other search tools, MC has introduced its own search toolbar, which downloads to your PC and installs itself inside your browser. In addition to the meta-search function, the MC toolbar also gives you access to phone numbers and addresses, public records, weather forecasts, maps and driving directions, and stock quotes and research. There's a newsticker that continuously streams breaking news headlines across your stream, and a pop-up blocker feature that has become all the rage of search toolbars.

In addition to the search function, MC's home page offers a few extra goodies, including "Featured Searches" and other resources such as Mail, Maps, Weather, Horoscopes, Public Records, and Classified.

MetaCrawler is a reasonably good search tool. I think I prefer the clustering results of Vivisimo, but if you like the meta-search concept, MetaCrawler is not a bad choice.

Help Desk

When you uninstall a program, you can do it one of two ways: use the Uninstall feature of that particular program, or the Add/Remove Programs feature of Windows. Sometimes, after you uninstall a program, the entry still remains in the Add/Remove Programs listing. If you want to get rid of these listings of programs long gone, you can do this by editing the Windows Registry. Select Start, then Run, and type REGEDIT in the box. The Registry Editor will pop up; navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, then SOFTWARE, then Microsoft, then Windows, then CurrentVersion, then Uninstall. From there, you can delete the registry keys for programs that you have already uninstalled. WARNING: deleting registry keys is serious business, and you can impact other programs if you accidentally delete the wrong one. Be careful when using this feature.

Do you have a question about searching the Internet or your computer in general? Drop me an e-mail at tom(at)inter-alia(dot)net – I’ll post your question (don’t worry, I won’t use your real name) and try to get an answer for you!

Access to Archival Databases System
The Access to Archival Databases (AAD) System gives you "online access to a selection of nearly 50 million historic electronic records created by more than 20 federal agencies on a wide range of topics." There's a detailed tutorial on how to properly search the databases, including information on
understanding electronic records, a data file's context, and the terminology behind the science. On the search page, you are first given a series of options: Subject, Geographic Area, Organization, Time Spam, or Creator. Once you have made your selection (I chose the Labor Unions subject), you
are taken to a list of matching databases, and with a couple of clicks you're viewing actual documents. A very cool research tool.

Net Journal Finder ($$)
Lots of fees to get to the good stuff here. NJF provides you with listings of services with back issues of more than 15,000 journals and newspapers. Trouble is, you have to pay NJF for access to the listings, but then once you find an article you may have to pay that service for a copy. I tried the demo and looked for periodicals on radiology -- NJF came up with three. Once I selected Applied Radiology, I was told articles for that journal cost $30, with a link to the site providing the content. I bet I could have found the link to that site without having to pay for access to this database.

Public Health Image Library
Provided by the Centers for Disease Control, this site acknowledges that much of the information critical to the communication of public health messages is pictorial rather than text-based. Here you'll find the offerings broken down by Photographs, Illustrations, Animations, and Audio/Visuals. You can browse by keyword or by browsing the various categories. There are a lot of sub-categories, so you can drill down to the image you're seeking. However, the search feature is a little confusing; when you click on one of the four buttons, you are taken to the same page. The "Browse By Category" Feature seems to apply to all four types of media, and it does not give you an option to search by type. Nevertheless, you'll find some very helpful images here.

Special Education Resources on the Internet
This simple website contains a collection of Internet-accessible information resources of interest to those interested in fields related to special education. Choose from one of 23 categories, including Legal Resources, Mental Retardation, Attention Deficit Disorder, Speech Impairment, Autism, Gifted & Talented, among others. Within each category is a list of twenty or more links for that particular subject. It looks like this site hasn't been updated since 2001, so some of the links are missing or outdated. Still, it's a pretty nifty resource.

United States Digital Map Library
Part of the USGenWeb Project, a set of genealogy websites, the Digital Map Library provides access to United States maps, state and county maps, and Indian Land Cessions to United States Treaty Maps. That's all you'll find here, but the maps themselves are pretty cool. Watch out -- some of them
are pretty large in size, so they take a while to download.

For those of you who have always wanted to be able to type upside down (I have no idea why), your site is now here -- Upside Down Typing.

If you're looking for a new clock to display on your desktop, give the Bar Code Clock a try.

Well, that’s it for Issue #132 – 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.

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Questions? New websites? Just want to talk? Send me an e-mail at tom(at)inter-alia(dot)net.