ZiefBrief

Google Books: Faulty Metadata?

Laura Miller at Salon has written a fascinating and troubling article on Google Books.  Miller interviews UC Berkeley professor Geoffrey Nunberg who wrote earlier about finding "endemic" errors in Google Books in an article for the Chronicle of Higher Education.  Miller describes a few of the errors that Nunberg found:

A search for books published before 1950 and containing the word "Internet" turned up the unlikely bounty of 527 results.

Other errors include misattributed authors -- Sigmund Freud is listed as a co-author of a book on the Mosaic Web browser and Henry James is credited with writing "Madame Bovary." Even more puzzling are the many subject misclassifications: an edition of "Moby Dick" categorized under "Computers," and "Jane Eyre" as "Antiques and Collectibles" ("Madame Bovary" got that label, too).

Metadata is the crucial information about a book that is included in a bibliographic record (title, author, publication date, etc.).  We librarians know that errors in bibliographic information in any database can make it impossible for users to know that a document or item is available.  For example, if an online catalog record misspells words in the book's title, the user may not be able to retrieve that book's bibliographic record when she searches for it using the title's correct spelling in the online catalog.  Google Books is often hailed by academics as the best thing since sliced bread, but librarians know that if the metadata is faulty, retrieving information from a database can be a frustrating endeavor. It's great to see this discussion about Google Books happening, and I hope that Google continues to work to improve its metadata (for a detailed response to Nunberg from Google's Jon Orwant describing how Google is trying to address these issues, see Nunberg's original blog post on the metadata problem).

Google Realtime Allows Social Media Content Searching

Google recently announced a specialized search page, Google Realtime, which allows you to search social media content from Twitter, Facebook, and more.  Read about it on the official Google blog.

Thanks for the tip, WisBlawg!

Google Searches in "The Ghost Writer"

A few months ago, I blogged about how watching law-themed movies or TV series with lawyers can be just a wee bit annoying for lay people in the same room with the JDs.  I just experienced my first moment of librarian high dudgeon while watching "The Ghost Writer" with my husband yesterday.  During one scene, Ewan McGregor's character uses Google to try to find out key information about other characters.  When McGregor's character entered his Google searches, he inserted a "+" sign between search terms.  Immediately, I began hitting my husband's leg.  He looked over at me wearily, nodded that he understood why I was so worked up, and gave me a warning look that said, "Just settle down and enjoy the movie." 

The source of my indignation?  The default connector in a basic Google search is "AND."  If you enter terms without a connector between them, Google automatically inserts an "AND" between your search terms.  In fact, entering a "+" sign before a search term is the signal that you use to tell Google to search for that term alone and to ignore any synonyms for that word. There was no need to enter a "+" sign for the searches in "The Ghost Writer," which shows me that Hollywood types spend very little time actually conducting Google searches.  Other than this little quibble, great movie!

Law Review Articles on Google Scholar and HeinOnline — A Comparison

No sooner had we posted our comparison of Google and Lexis/Westlaw case law searching than we find, on the HeinOnline Blog, a post comparing law review searching on HeinOnline and Google Scholar. The conclusion: if you have HeinOnline (and at USF, we do), start there to take advantage of the full range of content and features.

[Update: December 13, 2009] The HeinOnline/Google Scholar conversation continues in the HeinOnline Blog with a post responding to communications from Google Scholar about updates to its indexing and content. HeinOnline's conclusion comes as no surprise: those with access to HeinOnline still would do well to start there.

Google Case Law Searching: Pros & Cons

In this post, the Zief reference librarians,  Amy Wright, Lee Ryan, and John Shafer, summarize Google Scholar's case law search functions, pointing out its strengths and weaknesses for legal research.

Pros

Google Scholar conveniently brings together free internet case law from diverse sources. It does not appear to include all of the free case law that might exist, but it is one of the most extensive collections.  Current coverage is as follows:  state appellate and supreme court cases since 1950, federal district, appellate, tax and bankruptcy courts since 1923, and US Supreme Court cases since 1791. 

Google's case law search interface is user-friendly, making it a good option for novice researchers. Even the Advanced Search page  is intuitive and approachable. And for the more experienced user, there are some less well-known Google search features that add a fair amount of flexibility. These features include the ability to search for synonyms or to specify the "OR" operator.

Google's natural language search engine is quite powerful, and it appears to be fairly effective at retrieving leading cases and bubbling them up in the relevance-ranked search results.  So while you can't be assured with a Google Scholar search that you have identified all of the relevant cases, you are relatively likely to come up with one decent case that you can use as a springboard for your research. Of course, Lexis and Westlaw, with their interlinking of all types of materials, make it much easier to use one good case as a springboard because you can link from that case directly to a variety of secondary authorities, high-end cite-checking, annotated statutes, digests, etc.

The price: nothing is less expensive than free!

But... we in the information business have a saying:  "your research can be fast, cheap, and accurate; pick two." ... Which brings us to the cons...

Cons

As some USF researchers have already noticed, Google Scholar case law offers only natural language searching.  "Power users" are likely to miss the flexibility of "Terms & Connectors" ("Boolean") searching, and especially its ability to specify that terms appear within a certain proximity of one another.

Google Scholar case law search also does not offer the full range of field searching that Lexis and Westlaw offer. So, for example, it is not possible to specify that you want your search terms to appear only in the majority opinion, or to specify that you want to retrieve only the opinions authored by a certain judge. Google Scholar's date restriction options are also not as powerful as those found on Lexis and Westlaw — or even those on the free Justia Federal District Court Opinions & Orders search engine.

As far as primary authority goes, Google Scholar is strictly a case-law research tool. It does not offer searching of statutes, regulations, administrative agency opinions, and other crucial components of the law.

Google Scholar and Google Books do furnish access to a very limited range of secondary sources, including some law review articles, books, and practice materials.  These materials show up when you click on the "Cited By" links in your Google Scholar case law search results. However, if material is under copyright, you cannot obtain access to the full-text of the material.  Also, crucial secondary sources, such as American Law Reports, the Witkin publications, California Jurisprudence, Matthew Bender and Rutter Group practice guides, and treatises (McCarthy on Trademark; Bassett on California Community Property, etc.) are not available on Google.

There is no equivalent to the West Digest system or the Lexis headnote system on Google Scholar. 

While Google Scholar case law search results have a "How Cited" link that allows you to view a list of subsequent opinions that cite to a particular case, it does not have a sophisticated citator service like Westlaw's KeyCite or Shepard's on Lexis.  The "How Cited" feature on Google Scholar cannot tell you at a glance if a case has negative or positive history or if at least one holding in the case has been overturned.  Google Scholar cannot provide the prior or subsequent appellate history of the case.

Unlike Lexis and Westlaw, Google Scholar does not have all published U.S. case law. For example, coverage of state cases appears to begin in 1950  — even though there are free sources of California case law that have more coverage, including one source that extends back to 1850. Likewise, coverage of federal appellate cases begins only in 1924.

Our Conclusion —

Google Scholar is a welcome addition to the world of free online legal resources.  Consider using it when you need a "quick and dirty" case law search tool.  But we have a long way to go before Google supplants Lexis and Westlaw as a "one-stop shopping" legal research option.

Google Scholar Has Case Law

There are already tons of tweets and posts about Google Scholar's new case law content, so I'm not going to reinvent the wheel.  Yes, Google Scholar has case law now! 

Here's a roundup of posts about this exciting new development:

Google's official announcement;
Review of case law on Google Scholar over at Internet for Lawyers;
Librarian reviews over at Resource Shelf;
More librarian reviews at the Law Librarian Blog;
Another lawyer review over at Ernie the Attorney.

And just to add to all of the excitement, Legal Research Plus posted this week about a new ABA web resource that furnishes "prompt, accurate, unbiased information about newsworthy and legally significant cases pending in and decided by the Federal Courts of Appeals." 

It's been a fabulous week for free legal information on the web! 

Google's Caffeine

Google announced this week that it is testing a new search engine, code named "Caffeine."  According to media reports, the new search engine is supposed to include changes to indexing, ranking, and crawling, although Google is being a bit coy and has yet to spell out the changes in detail.  In Google's words, Caffeine is designed to "push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions."  And that means what exactly?!!? 

A quick glimpse at the new page shows no user interface changes, and given Google's success with its clean and simple page, I would have been shocked if it messed with the user interface.  I did a quick comparison of Caffeine and the standard Google search engine, searching with the following query:  "climate change" impact human migration

Caffeine and regular old Google gave me similar search results, but regular old Google gave me links to scholarly articles first:

However, Caffeine did not highlight Google Scholar results for me at the top of the search result page:

Since I like the way regular old Google highlights Google Scholar material for me, I'll stick with it for now.  For techie reviews of Caffeine and more search result comparisons, check out these posts by Vanessa Fox and Mary Jo Foley.

Wolfram Alpha, the New Search Engine on the Block

New search engine Wolfram Alpha launched last week, and so far I'm having a hard time imagining ways in which it will be useful for my usual Internet legal research queries.  Sure, it's handy for socioeconomic data, math, and statistics, but it's not handling any legal terms that I throw at it.  I'm not alone -- see this review from 3 Geeks and a Law Blog. 

If you haven't been following the buzz around Wolfram Alpha, it's essentially a search engine that specializes in data compilation.  According to the website, "You enter your question or calculation, and Wolfram|Alpha uses its built-in algorithms and growing collection of data to compute the answer."  There's a handy-dandy examples by topic page that shows you how to use Wolfram Alpha to research various topics, like Money and Finance, Socioeconomic Data, and more.  Just don't expect it to recognize fun legal terms like "res judicata." 

Monica Goodling -- Poor Lexis Researcher?

The release of  "An Investigation of Allegations of Politicized Hiring by Monica Goodling and Other Staff in the Office of the Attorney General" (click here for the 524 KB .pdf file from the DOJ site) has been all over the news and blogosphere ever since it was released on the 28th of July. For those of you who haven't read the 150 page document we offer the following condensed version: allegations confirmed. What caught Ziefbrief's eye was the discussion of the techniques Ms. Goodling used to determine the political leanings of applicants. According to the report: "We found that Goodling’s Internet research on candidates for Department positions was extensive and designed to obtain their political and ideological affiliations." In a footnote the report noted " It does not violate federal law or Department policy to search for and consider  political information concerning candidates for political positions.  However, Goodling  also conducted such searches, and considered the results of those searches, for  candidates for career positions, including IJs and career candidates for temporary details."
The report also includes the actual lexis/nexis search that Jan Williams, her predecessor as the Department’s White House Liaison, passed on to her to use in screening applicants:

"[First name of a candidate]! and pre/2 [last name of a  candidate] w/7 bush or gore or republican! or democrat! or  charg! or accus! or criticiz! or blam! or defend! or iran contra  or clinton or spotted owl or florida recount or sex! or  controvers! or racis! or fraud! or investigat! or bankrupt! or  layoff! or downsiz! or PNTR or NAFTA or outsourc! or indict!  or enron or kerry or iraq or wmd! or arrest! or intox! or fired  or sex! or racis! or intox! or slur! or arrest! or fired or  controvers! or abortion! or gay! or homosexual! or gun! or  firearm!"

We note a number of problems with the search technique in the above search. Ignoring the redundant search term "fired", we note that the search is incredibly broad -- especially if the search is run in one of the general news collections on Nexis. We challenge all ZiefBrief readers to come up with a better search to identify the political inclinations of potential members of the AG's staff. Submit your suggestion as a comment to this posting.

Monday Buzz: Cuil Takes On Google

Well! I was all set to blog today about the new search engine that everybody is talking about, Cuil (pronounced "cool"), but Shawn, my colleague at Gleeson, has beat me to it!  Check out Shawn's informative post about Cuil on Gleeson Gleanings, including a link to a librarian blogger's detailed review of Cuil.