Now, you can retrieve older tweets more easily, within a range you define, using the newly added "Dates" limiter on Twitter's Advanced Search page.

Simply add a beginning and ending date to the "Dates" limiter to define your date range.

You can also "mix and match" the search criteria on the Advanced Search page to create more targeted searches. For example, you could search for tweets "From these accounts" (searching by username), with "Any of these [key]words," and limit the date range during which the tweets were posted.

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Yahoo! does still recognize an asterisk as a proximity connector representing the concept of "within one word." To conduct a "within one word" search at Yahoo!, the search would be expressed as follows: "Mark * Rosch" (including the quotation marks).

We have updated our Search Engine Features Comparison Chart to reflect this change.

The post Yahoo! Drops Proximity Connector appeared first on Continuing Legal Education (MCLE) in California, MCLE Los Angeles, CLE Orange County, Irvine & San Francisco.

The new Bing results display interface is broken up into three columns. The widest column, on the left-hand side displays a traditional looking list of relevant "blue link" results. The middle of the three columns, the "Snapshot," is supposed to feature "useful information related to [your] searches and compiled by Bing as a single 'snapshot' – all in one place in a separate column." However, all we have seen in this column our test searches are Ads.

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More Social

The far right-hand side of the search results page is where the most visible change to the results reside - in the collapsible "Sidebar." When you're logged in/connected to your Facebook account, the Sidebar includes "recommendations" from your Facebook friends based on your search terms and their "Likes." The Sidebar also includes signals from "experts and enthusiasts" leading to their blogs or Twitter feeds relevant to your search terms.

While conceptually similar to Google's Search Plus Your World, introduced earlier this year, Bing's implementation is different. While Google has chosen to tightly integrate the "social signals" into its main search results list, Bing has (mostly) chosen to segregate the social signals to the Sidebar. However, Bing does include social signals in the left-hand column of search results in the form of a "thumbs up" icon that indicates which of your Facebook friends has Liked a particular site on the results list. (It si unclear if these Likes are figured into where a particular site will rank on the results list. Additionally, where Google is relying heavily on its own Google+ social network for its social signals, Bing is compiling these signals from the more popular Facebook social network.

Less Search

As part of this redesign, Bing has moved the "Advanced Search" features that are available to narrow down your search results after you had conducted an initial search. Now, to access the Advanced search features you have to highlight your keywords in the search box (on the search results page) to bring up the link to the Advanced Search menu. This will also bring up a list of other suggested search terms.

Part of the rationale behind moving these features may be found in a quote from Bing Senior Director Stefan Weitz. "People are using the Web to do things in the real world, and that’s a big change from where things were a decade ago," he said in the press release announcing the changes. "And so the 10 blue links that search has been predicated on for the last decade no longer makes sense. Simply put, that’s not how you get things done." While this may be true for some searches, this is not necessarily true for the types of background and investigative research lawyers, paralegals, and other legal professionals need to conduct via search engines. 

The post Bing Revamps Results: More Social…Less Search appeared first on Continuing Legal Education (MCLE) in California, MCLE Los Angeles, CLE Orange County, Irvine & San Francisco.

With no announcement or fanfare, Google has killed off its Uncle Sam Search. Google's Uncle Sam Search returned results only from government-related sources (U.S. federal, state, and local government agencies). Users first started reporting the disappearance of the specialized search engine on June 2, when they noticed requests in their browsers' address bar to https://www.google.com/unclesam were redirected to the main Google Web Search page. Users reported what they thought was an error on Google's Web Search Help Forum for "Unexpected Search Results."

Google's U.S. Government Search (a.k.a. Uncle Sam Search) returned results from
government agencies at all levels.

In the Forum, user niccook1 described how he had contacted the Google Community Manager directly about the issue and received the following response:

"I saw your forum threads earlier today and have been investigating the issue. The redirect you now experience when you visit Google.com/unclesam is the intended behavior. If you'd like to restrict your search results to government sites only, add [site:.gov] to your query. You can also apply a broader restriction by adding [site:.gov OR site:.org] to your query."

By describing the "redirect you now experience when you visit Google.com/unclesam" as "the intended behavior," the community manager acknowledges that Google means to shift users to the general Google Web Search. In his response, user niccook1 lays out a well-reasoned response as to why the suggested domian-restricted site:.gov search IS NOT THE SAME as the previously available Google Uncle Sam search.

In the closest thing to an official reply, Rishi Khaitan, a Google Search Product Manager replied, in part,  to the Help Forum on June 6:

"I personally apologize for our poor communication regarding the termination of Uncle Sam search. We should have done a better job communicating this in advance, and I apologize for that. In the future, I'll make sure we find a way to do better. As for Uncle Sam search, our analysis showed that moving searchers over to regular web search would help most people find what they're looking for faster."

From our own experience (and the continued commenting on the Help Forum thread) not all users agree with Khaitan. But for now at least, it seems that Uncle Sam is gone.

UPDATE: Google's Uncle Sam Search was not the only casualty of this coup. Google has apaprently discontinued all of its /specialty search engines, including:

• Google.com/about
• Google.com/bsd
• Google.com/linux
• Google.com/mac
• Google.com/microsoft

Portions of this post are excerpted from:

"Google For Lawyers: Essential Search Tips and Productivity Tools" is a hands-on guide to the Google tools, tips, and tricks that can help you work smarter...not harder.

The post Google Kills Uncle Sam Search appeared first on Continuing Legal Education (MCLE) in California, MCLE Los Angeles, CLE Orange County, Irvine & San Francisco.

Recently, in response to query on Twitter, we created a Google-powered search of Pennsylvania statutes. This got us thinking about other states that offered access to their statutes online, but did not offer the full flexibility and/or familiar search options offered by Google's Web search. 

So, we started poking around a bit, looking for other state statutory materials onto which we might superimpose a Google-powered search. Our second Google-powered statute search covers Texas's statues and Constitution.

The Texas legislature offers an excellent search option for its statutes and Constitution at http://linkon.in/dqLvV5. There, you can browse or search the entire Code, or search individual Titles or the Constitution. Your keywords are even highlighted in the search results. While the Texas Legislature search does a nice job with Boolean and phrase searching, our test searches seemed to indicate that one weakness was in the exclusionary AND NOT/BUT NOT search - particularly when trying to exclude a phrase.

The Google-powered search we created for Texas statutes and Constitution allows for the exclusionary search using the minus sign ( - ).

Based on the dozen or so test searches we ran setting the search up, it seems to catch all of the statutes' content - but all of the usual caveats/disclaimers apply.

Let us know if you find any Titles in particular it does not return.

Google-Powered Search of Texas Statues and Constitution

The post Google-powered Search of the Texas Statutes (and Constitution) appeared first on Continuing Legal Education (MCLE) in California, MCLE Los Angeles, CLE Orange County, Irvine & San Francisco.

In response to a tweet yesterday afternoon mentioning the awkwardness of the existing search offered by the state of Pennsylvania for the online version of its statutes, we created a Google-powered custom search of the state's statute pages/files. It allows you to search the Pennsylvania statutes with all of the familiar Google Boolean connectors, syntax, etc. This custom-search is accessing the the pages and files as provided by the Pennsylvania state Legislature.

Thanks for all the positive feedback we've received since originally posting the search on Twitter and Facebook. While the search seems to cover all 79 Titles of the Pennsylvania statutes, we're not 100% sure the results are all encompassing. Based on the dozen or so test searches we ran setting the search up, it seems to catch all of the statutes' content - but all of the usual caveats/disclaimers apply.

Let us know if you find any Titles in particular it does not return.

Google-Powered Search of Pennsylvania Statues and Constitution

The post Google Powered Search of the Pennsylvania Statutes (and Constitution) appeared first on Continuing Legal Education (MCLE) in California, MCLE Los Angeles, CLE Orange County, Irvine & San Francisco.