Today I have been working on planning a trip related to my marketing job. Getting my head around new geography and preparing the materials needed for the visits has me exhausted mentally. That and my Golden Retriever Guy, really doesn’t like storms, so no sleep last night.
I have yet to check out Chrome, I’m interested in reading more about Google’s newspaper scanning project. The highlight I hope for in that work is that Legal Ads will be included. So far it looks promising. If anyone knows of an electronic source for legal ads I’d me very interested in hearing from you.
Legal Ad location was one of those challenges in the law firm that required extensive team work and diligence, as well as a scan of either the hard copy or a trip to the library to review the microfilm. Neither choice was pleasant, although newspaper ink on your hands could be scary in the halls of a law firm.
I also just saw that Lexis has a Beta websearch product. My first quick search was unimpressive. Perhaps when I’ve had some sleep and my brain is a bit more fresh I’ll become more impressed with this project.
As an aside, do vendors really feel that to remain competitive they must have a pot on every burner? Could they remain viable if they just concentrated on the things that really work for them rather than expanding into areas with lots of other players who already excel? Can Westlaw and Lexis beat Google at web searching, even by indexing legal sites only? Do the medical web search engines do a better job?
Perhaps its time to review this analytically. I think I’ve just discovered my next big personal writing project for the fall. Stream of consciousness can be a good thing, even if I’m not Faulkner.
