Our students start their research assignments with Google. Almost always. If/when Google enters the legal publishing arena, it will change the landscape like no other development. The April issue of California Lawyer magazine has a handy 2-page article “Turbocharge Your Google Searches“ by Tom McNichol. One of my favorite tips from the article is “To get an instant definition of a word . . . type define: followed immediately by the word(s) you want defined (with no space after the colon).” Google has now replaced my desk copy of Webster’s!
One of our students in Advanced Legal Research reviewed and had great fun with a CALI (Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Information) exercise, Yolanda Jones’s “The Legal Research Game: Fee or Free Edition,” and made this observation:
Maybe the most interesting thing I learned through this tutorial had only a tenuous, tangential relation to legal research. Apparently, when doing a Google search, if you include a TILDE before a particular word, Google will include various forms of that word (including synonyms) in its search. So “~law” would return results for “law” and “legal,” as well as other related forms.
Erika Wayne
Paul Lomio
Kate Wilko
George Wilson
Sergio Stone
Brian Provenzale
July 31, 2008 at 12:21 pm
[...] “Maybe the most interesting thing I learned through this tutorial had only a tenuous, tangential relation to legal research. Apparently, when doing a Google search, if you include a TILDE before a particular word, Google will include various forms of that word (including synonyms) in its search. So ‘~law’ would return results for ‘law’ and ‘legal,’ as well as other related forms.” — Legalresearchplus [...]
August 13, 2008 at 3:17 pm
[...] “Maybe the most interesting thing I learned through this tutorial had only a tenuous, tangential relation to legal research. Apparently, when doing a Google search, if you include a TILDE before a particular word, Google will include various forms of that word (including synonyms) in its search. So ‘~law’ would return results for ‘law’ and ‘legal,’ as well as other related forms.” — Legalresearchplus [...]