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March 3, 2007

Ted Tjaden

Custom Google Search Engine to Search Major Canadian Law Firm Websites

I have created a rudimentary Custom Google Search Engine for searching major Canadian law firm websites. As many of you know, there are often excellent newsletters and other bulletins on the law firm websites, especially on new or recent areas of law or important court decisions.

Readers of SLAW are encouraged to try it and provide feedback (make it a "Favourite" or a "Bookmark"). If anyone is willing to work on improving it, let me know and I can "invite" you as a contributor. Ideally, one of our colleagues in an academic law library in Canada would take ownership of this type of customized search engine since Google search engines customized by Universities are eligible for "ad-free" sites (the foregoing link includes Google ads as part of the search results, something which I would prefer to do without).

I have tried experimenting with some of the advanced features to "tweak" better results but have instead reverted to having the search engine search the entire law firm website. The disadvantage of searching the entire website, however, is that you get law firm marketing material in some of your results. However, I found when I tried limiting the search to only the publication pages of law firms, the search results were too narrow and the advanced customization features were initially too daunting for me since I don't have a lot of time right now to learn these advanced features.

I chose larger law firm websites based on Lexpert rankings.

I debated including Canadian law society websites or Canadian law school law library websites. What do people think? Is it worth including all of these in a single search engine or would you keep them separate?

If this posting motivates anyone to new and better ideas, feel free to take over my initial efforts.

Ted Tjaden has been a lawyer for over 20 years during which time he also obtained his Master of Information and Master of Laws degree from the University of Toronto. He is currently immersed in various Knowledge Management projects.
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2 Comments on “Custom Google Search Engine to Search Major Canadian Law Firm Websites”

  1. Cheryl Stephens says:
    March 4, 2007 at 3:21 pm

    I just used it. It is great. Thanks for it.

  2. Matthew Dickinson says:
    March 7, 2007 at 6:08 am

    Hi there – you may be interested in our legal alert service for Canada which we launched a couple of months ago. It provides a similar service (www.linexlegal.com), save that via Linex you can also access information from many other jurisdictions. We also have a team of editors and researchers removing all information that is not relevant to practicing lawyers (reducing the information overload). You will also note that it is an add free site! Feel free to register.

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