On Friday, Google launched its “SearchWiki,” a way of customizing your own search results. I gather that they’re rolling it out according to some pattern, which means you may not see this feature in your results for a few days yet.

What you will see is illustrated below:

If, for example, Slaw hadn’t come up top in my results in a search for “slaw,” I could have moved it up there with the arrow, and ever after it would be first. For me. Which is what I don’t quite get: why exactly would I want to fix the results of . . . [more]

Lawyers often pride themselves as being the gatekeepers to legal information. But with the proliferation of free legal citations and commentary online, some are turning to Google.

Devin Johnston, a law student at UofM and contributor at Law is Cool, has an excellent piece today, GoogleLII: Using Google to Research Case Law.

He outlines some basic techniques like advance searches, and the quality of information found on the net.

Devin does say that Googling is not appropriate for traditional legal practice. But Prof. Moin Yahya of the University of Alberta also noted earlier this year that the failure . . . [more]

Google has pulled out of its proposed advertising deal with Yahoo! due to fears of government antitrust litigation. Details are available here on The Official Google Blog. . . . [more]

I wonder how Google is choosing the material that it reports it is OCRing from scanned material save to the web?

In the past, scanned documents were rarely included in search results as we couldn’t be sure of their content. We had occasional clues from references to the document– so you might get a search result with a title but no snippet highlighting your query. Today, that changes. We are now able to perform OCR on any scanned documents that we find stored in Adobe’s PDF format. This Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology lets us convert a picture (of a

For a price-tag of $125 million ((Which must be small change for Google)) Google, the Association of American Publishers and the Authors Guild resolved a challenge to the Google Books project.

The settlement agreement resolves a class-action suit filed on Sept. 20, 2005, by the Authors Guild and certain authors, and a suit filed three years ago, by five major publisher-members of the Association of American Publishers: McGraw-Hill, Pearson Education, Penguin Group, John Wiley & Sons and Simon & Schuster. It is subject to approval by the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York.

For . . . [more]

Benjamin Edelman, who teaches marketing in the Harvard School of Business, has initiated a class action against Google on behalf of trademark owners whose marks have been infringed by typosquatters. (See the story on Arstechnica.) Typosquatting is the practice of registering domain names that approximate the names of real companies’ websites in the hope of obtaining advantage from internet users who arrive there by mistyping (e.g. http://goggle.com/). Edelman claims that Google places ads on these fraudulent sites and benefits from revenue generated when a user clicks into the sites by mistake. Given the number of such pseudo-sites, Edelman . . . [more]

Doug Cornelius–someone whose thoughts many of us have followed through his blog KM Space–is leaving his real estate practice at his law firm in Boston and with it his hard-core legal knowledge management work. That being said, I am still hopeful he will practice what he learned there about knowledge management and will continue (at least a little) to update his KM blog. He had me worried that he wouldn’t.

Doug has joined Beacon Capital Partners, a real estate firm also in Boston, as their Chief Compliance Officer.

In talking to Doug recently, I learned that . . . [more]

Attorney Sergei Lemberg, the head of Lemberg & Associates, LLC and who specializes in “lemon law“, has a practical guest blog post over at the Virtual Law Practice blog worth reading. He talks about how he uses newer Web technologies to get work done, collaborate with clients, and advertise his practice.

Some highlights:

I have clients from all over the country and rarely see them in person. I use VOIP for my office phone system for onsite and off-site staff, which gives the impression of everyone being under the same roof. I also take advantage of the Web-based

…Not that there was a lot that could have been done to improve the already stellar blog by Jordan Furlong. Still, Law21 has a bright new look and a lot of improved functionality. Check out the nifty AJAXed menus in the sidebar — heck, take the whole thing for a test drive. You’ll see that Jordan’s moving his blog closer to functioning as a nexus for thought on innovation and change in the practice of law, which is no bad thing. Congratulations, Jordan, on this upgrade. . . . [more]

As a follow-up to the post on Google Picasa’s facial recognition software, there are other new potential Google products that are raising privacy concerns.

A Google spokesperson announced this week a patent application that will rank social network users based on their influence, measured by metrics that would include how many people visited their profile, number of friends, and how active they were on the site.

The product would even track how frequently people post on sites and how successful they are in getting others to read or watch things that they post. Ranking could also be based on . . . [more]

Just a short post to raise a question that’s discussed on Law.com today, which is why American legal blogs seem to be populated by boys and abandoned by women.

That doesn’t seem to be the case here at Slaw. Is that something about Slaw? Or Canadian law? Or simply that our focus on legal information, technology and research isn’t the same as those blogs that Law.com was looking at?

It offers three theories (none of which is particularly compelling:

Theory #1: Women law bloggers are out there, you just don’t see them. ((Women bloggers aren’t as relentlessly self-promoting))

Theory

Few people probably noticed the changes to one of the software features in Google Pack last month. Fewer still have considered the privacy implications.

Picasa, a photo management and sharing system, launched a facial recognition system. Users tag their photos, and the software searches through pictures to find the same people and place tags on them too.

Google, who owns Picasa, has had these capabilities for a couple years now since they acquired Neven Vision.

Theoretically a user could pick off other people’s photos from Flickr or Facebook, upload them to their Picasa account and tag . . . [more]