Musings About Librarianship – “In the last month, there were two interesting developments that caused quite a stir in my twitter feeds (see discussions here and here). Firstly, there was an interesting announcement on the Unpaywall mailing list, that Unpaywall had detected that Semantic Scholar which was one of the biggest repository sources they were… Continue Reading
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Category Archives: Search Engines
Rethinking Search: Making Experts out of Dilettantes
MIT Technology Review: “…a team of Google researchers has published a proposal for a radical redesign that throws out the ranking approach and replaces it with a single large AI language model—a future version of BERT or GPT-3. The idea is that instead of searching for information in a vast list of web pages, users… Continue Reading
Ads Are Impersonating Government Websites in Google Results, Despite Ban
The Markup: “…Last year, the Federal Trade Commission sued On Point Global, a company that allegedly advertised websites via Google search where you could renew your driver’s license, buy a fishing license, or determine if you were eligible for public benefits like Section 8 housing. But in fact, when people signed up for any of… Continue Reading
7 Gmail Browser Extensions That Are So Good They Should Be Native Features
Gizmodo: “Google is pretty regularly adds new features to Gmail, but there’s always room for improvement, and third-party developers have been quick to plug the gaps. Here are seven browser add-ons that are polished and powerful enough to be native features (and hopefully will be one day…)…” Continue Reading
Welcome to the EU Council Library LibGuides
European Council, Council of the European Union: “The Council Library guides provide a selection of information resources relevant to the work of the Council of the EU and the European Council: information databases, (e)journals, (e)books, articles and EU publications. Search the online Eureka catalogue to discover the full collections.” Search All Guides, By Group, By… Continue Reading
Anyone can use this powerful facial-recognition tool and that’s a problem
CNN Business: “You probably haven’t seen PimEyes, a mysterious facial-recognition search engine, but it may have spotted you. If you upload a picture of your face to PimEyes’ website, it will immediately show you any pictures of yourself that the company has found around the internet. You might recognize all of them, or be surprised… Continue Reading
Google will automatically enroll users in two-factor authentication soon
PCWorld – “Most security experts agree that two-factor authentication (2FA) is a critical part of securing your online accounts. Google agrees, but it’s taking an extra step: It’s going to automatically sign Google account holders up for two-factor accounts. In a way, Google sees two-factor authentication as a replacement for passwords, which Mark Risher, Google’s… Continue Reading
Review: Own the Map, by Conrad Samm
Via LLRX – Review: Own the Map, by Conrad Samm – Jerry Lawson highly recommends Conrad Saam’s intriguing new book, Own the Map, which encourages lawyers to think about marketing in new and better ways. The author’s primary thesis is that most lawyers should concentrate appealing to potential clients near the lawyer’s location. Saam develops… Continue Reading
How we fought Search spam on Google in 2020
Google Search Central: “…Hacked spam was still rampant in 2020 as the number of vulnerable web sites remained quite large, although we have improved our detection capability by more than 50% and removed most of the hacked spam from search results….Before we deliver a set of search results on Google, there’s a lot that happens… Continue Reading
USPTO chief information officer most excited about new search algorithms
FedScoop – “New search algorithms for relevant prior art most excite the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s CIO right now. USPTO created the machine-learning algorithms to increase the speed at which patents are examined by importing relevant prior art — all information on its claim of originality — into pending applications sent to art units, said Jamie Holcombe. Filtering… Continue Reading
Adding information from your law blog to Wikipedia
Kevin O’Keefe – Lexblog: “via an existing entry or a footnote makes good sense. Contributing to the advancement of the law. Making reliable and credible legal information more accessible to legal professions and the public. Wikipedia appears on page one of Google’s search results forty-six percent of the time. Others are citing legal blogs, and… Continue Reading
8 Search Engines That Rocked Before Google Even Existed
MakeUseOf: “Google wasn’t always the king. These nostalgic search engines paved the way and we’ll never forget them. Though the web became publicly available in 1990, the first web search engine didn’t arrive until 1993. Up until then, all websites were manually tracked and indexed by people. And while we now recognize Google as the… Continue Reading
