Legal Search Marketing

Archive for August, 2005

Jupiters Joseph Laszlo lists his funny Top 5 Reasons to Launch Google Talk.

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5. Larry and Sergey got tired of yelling across the office at one another.

4. Skype’s profit margins just too tempting to pass up.

3. Felt they just hadn’t confused the market sufficiently in the past couple of days.

2. Google doesn’t know you intimately enough just reading your e-mail and peeking at what kind of naughty pictures you search for.

1. Wanted yet another communication channel via which to refuse to talk to CNET.

Nolo.com is one of the better legal reseach sites on the net. You can do legal research by topic in one of Nolo’s Law Centers, or research through one of Nolo’s features, which include:

• Nolo’s Legal Encyclopedia with articles on legal topics in an easy to understand style,
• Ask Auntie Nolo with questions and answers on a wide variety of legal topics,
• Nolo’s Law Dictionary,
• Calculators for number-crunching, and
• Statutes & Cases

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The Internet Legal Research Group is another good Web site for free legal research, and is divided into several sections, including:

• Legal Profession,
• Academia,
• Legal Research,
• E-Mail Updates, and
• Attorney Referral Network.

The Legal Research Section is divided into three sections: Law Runner, ILRG Legal Bookstore, and ILRG Web Index. In the Law Runner section under Legal Research, you can go to the Global Index, or the USA Index. The Global Index includes home pages for every nation in the world, including all islands and territories. The USA Index has a listing for each state and then includes some or all of the following links to the following within each state: the state’s home page, judicial branch & case law sources, legislative branch, executive branch, and miscellaneous state government sites.

SOURCE: Allbusiness.com

Good article from Law.com about how the Internets virtual law libraries provide great legal research information.

Some of the most extensive and accurate Web sites are virtual law libraries, such as those maintained by Cornell, Georgetown, Emory, Indiana and Washburn universities. In addition, the researcher can feel comfortable with the Internet Law Library, formerly maintained by the House of Representatives and now part of LawGuru; and the Law Library of Congress, just to name two of numerous sites out there.

At Georgetown University’s law library, part of its mission as the research arm of the faculty and students of Georgetown Law Center is to "collect and organize information about research resources on the Web." This site, as well, is quick-loading, with extensive federal and state collections, and links to other research sources. Georgetown also provides a thorough tutorial section on researching statutory, case law and secondary sources.

According to the LA Times Google is rumored to be launching an instant messaging service called Google Talk.

Continuing its rapid expansion into new product categories, the Internet search giant plans to launch an instant messaging program called Google Talk as early as Wednesday, according to people familiar with the service.

The new service follows by just a few days the introduction of Google Sidebar, which pulls news stories, photographs, weather updates, stock quotes and other features onto a user’s computer without opening a Web browser.

With all the new services, Google now competes with Internet portals such as Yahoo Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Time Warner Inc.’s America Online squarely on their turf, even as those companies encroach onto Google’s with updated search engines.

MSN announced on its blog that they are crawling certain feeds in order to index breaking news as quickly as possible.

One of the key elements of having a great index is having fresh content.  If someone searches for Vista on the day that we announced the name for the next version of Windows then they should be able to see relevant results. 

This means that we need to have the content in our index within minutes of these types of events happening. In order to do this we built a simple crawler to get News and Blogs that break this type of news.

GOOGLE USERS ARE PREDOMINANTLY MALE, but Yahoo! has a higher proportion of searchers between the ages of 18 and 34 than Google, MSN, or Ask Jeeves, according to a new Hitwise study, "The Online Search Report," released Wednesday.

When looking at the demographics of visitors to four search engines–Google, Yahoo! Search, MSN Search, and Ask Jeeves–Hitwise found that Google users were 53.6 percent male, while Ask Jeeves users were 58.7 percent female, for the four weeks ending July 16. Yahoo! and MSN searchers were predominantly women, who accounted for 50.2 percent of Yahoo! Search users and 53.7 percent of MSN Search users.

OTHER STATS:

AskJeeves: 58.7% female.
MSN: 53.7 percent female.
Yahoo: 50.2% female.
Google: 46.4% female.

MSN had highest proportion of users over 55.
Google appealed most to households with income over $100K.

87% of Searches at Google, MSN and Yahoo! use 2 or fewer keywords.
69% of AskJeeves searches use 2 or fewer keywords.

Business and finance sites also saw traffic from the search engines, with Ask Jeeves sending the largest proportion of searchers–8.55 percent–to business-related sites, followed by MSN Search (8.10 percent), Yahoo! Search (7.10 percent), and Google (6.54 percent).

SOURCES : Media Post – SEL

Yahoo Local has expanded with new city and neighborhood pages, along with increased display of maps and use of community reviews.

Yahoo features custom pages for major cities throughout the US, as listed here, with areas of those cities broken down into individual neighborhoods. In addition, it has coverage of all cities throughout the US offering information in various ways.

Its important that your law firm is listed in the Yahoo local listings, as well as the normal Yahoo search listings.

Paid third-party ads on Google that use the trademark of car insurance company Geico in the text of ads could infringe trademark law, and Google may be liable for such ads, according to a recent court opinion.

Although Geico senior counsel Jonathan Shafner said Tuesday that the court opinion signaled that the judge wants the two sides to reach a settlement, he said he could not comment on any settlement discussions.

If the parties do not settle within the 30-day period for which the judge granted a stay, trial could continue on whether Google is liable for damages if Geico’s trademarks are found to be infringed from any non-Geico ads that refer to Geico and what the damages would be, Shafner said.

SOURCE: News.com

Search Engine Watch has a post about penalties imposed at Yahoo and Msn for spam like activities, which can get your web site banned. I personally dont think Yahoo or MSN is doing enough because I see spam like sites all the time in those seach indexes.

In Yahoo’s guidelines pages for webmasters, the following is considered spam:

• Pages that harm accuracy, diversity or relevance of search results
• Pages dedicated to directing the user to another page
• Pages that have substantially the same content as other pages
• Sites with numerous, unnecessary virtual hostnames
• Lots of pages that were automatically generated or of little value
• Pages using methods to artificially inflate search engine ranking
• The use of text that is hidden from the user
• Pages that give the search engine different content than what the end-user sees
• Excessively cross-linking sites to inflate a site’s apparent popularity
• Pages built primarily for the search engines
• Misuse of competitor names
• Multiple sites offering the same content
• Pages that use excessive pop-ups, interfering with user navigation
• Pages that seem deceptive, fraudulent or provide a poor user experience

The bottom line is that you should never do anything that any of the search engines might consider spam. You really don’t have to because as long as your site is search engine friendly and optimized, has good content and has links from other related sites, then you should be able to get good listings for your legal site.

Ron Friedmann reports that Clark Wilson of Vancouver is offering RSS feeds for its publications. Friedmann exhorts more firms to jump on the blogging bandwagon:

"Law firms have many options to ‘touch’ clients digitally: blogs, RSS feeds, Webinars, streaming video, and podcasts. It surprises me that more firms are not opting to experiment with these. Given that firms already generate a lot of content, the marginal cost to distribute in channels other than print and e-mail that might be more appealing to many readers (including clients and prospects) is relatively low …"

SOURCE: LAW.com Blog