Tag Archives: competitive intelligence

Real-Time Social Media Search

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Posted in Business Information, News, Search, Social media and tagged , ,

At one point in time, there were a number of sites trying to provide search to information as it came whistling by on social media streams.  Most of them have gotten out of the business or, if they have a social search, it’s not necessarily that current.  Kurrently caught my eye because it seems to provide a fast rolling response to any search you put into it.  It retrieves messages posted to Facebook, Twitter, and Google+.

To be honest, I was a bit skeptical so I put in a hashtag that I was following on Twitter and watched the search results on Twitter and the stream on Kurrently.  At least in this case, Kurrently was displaying results before Twitter was, although it was a matter of a few minutes so it may have just been a matter of freshening my browser.

Kurrently.com showing latest results on #reinventlaw hashtag

Kurrently.com showing latest results on #reinventlaw hashtag

Kurrently can filter out messages from any one of the three buckets it is monitoring, so you can limit the stream to just Facebook or Google.  You can also speed up or slow down the stream, in case it’s roaring past or just dripping like water torture.  You can also bookmark your search term – just as you can by bookmarking a search on Twitter – so it would be relatively easy to create a folder of saved topics.  However, since the whole goal is to see what’s happening at the moment, I’m not sure bookmarking on Kurrently makes a whole lot of sense.

I’m adding Kurrently to my toolkit when I want to watch a broad topic that is likely to be discussed in more than one of the main social media locations, or as a quick dive into a discussion or for a sense of sentiment.

Search US Public Records Cheaply

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Posted in Business Information, U.S. and tagged , ,

Public records are a wealth of information about clients, opponents, and other parties related to cases.  They can unearth information about properties and corporations that can be helpful in building a case and creating a litigation strategy.  United States researchers have some of the most extensive access to this sort of information.  The Legal Skills Prof blog highlighted a story from Law Technology News on TLO, an online service that has reports starting at US$1.  If you are doing public records research and the free services aren’t getting you anywhere, this looks like an excellent option.

Searching Social Content Specifically

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Posted in Business Information, News, Social media and tagged , ,

You can search social media sites like Twitter or Facebook using a variety of tools, both their internal search tools as well as external ones like Topsy.com or FBsearch.us.  Another external search tool I recently came across is Social Mention.  Social Mention distinguishes itself by allowing you to focus your search narrowly on types of social content: comments, social bookmarks, or blogs, for example.

Which Way the Wind Blows

It is also different because it attempts to provide sentiment analysis.  Your search results return like any typical search engine, date ranked, listed in the center of the page.  On the left-hand side, you see the difference.

First, you can immediately see how many contributors are talking about your search query and when the last mention was made.  You can also see whether the trend of discussion is positive, neutral, or negative.  This doesn’t seem to be entirely accurate, so consider it the same way you consider the warning flags in your favorite online legal research citator.   You can click on the word negative to focus your search on just those type of results.

Save Your Search

Social Mention has the relatively unusual ability to save your search results as a downloadable spreadsheet.  Once you have run a search – and applied a filter, like source filtering or sentiment filtering to show only positive results – you can select one of the comma-separated value (CSV) links on the right hand side.  The spreadsheet contains a dozen rows, including title, description, and source.  This may be an easier way of handling your search results – you can sort by the author, for example – than paging through results on the Web site.

Social search remains somewhat limited.  While social media generates a huge amount of content, if you are looking for specific authors or individuals, you may not find them using social tools.  Social Mention does not appear to index any Facebook content, which is one of the best locations for litigators to find information.  But it can be an invaluable source for lawyers and librarians who are involved in business development efforts and current awareness on firm clients.

More Realtime Search While Mobile

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Posted in Android, BlackBerry, Business Information, iPad, iPhone, Mobile, Search, Twitter and tagged , , , ,

Topsy.com is one of the best real-time search tools available.  It is one of the last still standing, surviving Google’s own realtime search effort, and third parties like Collecta.  A search on Topsy will return results from blogs, Twitter, and Google Plus (Google+).

Techcrunch reported this week that Topsy has launched a mobile site, at http://m.topsy.com.  This is a great complement to their normal Web site search, making it easy to quickly look up an expert or discussion even when you don’t have access to your computer.

 

Searching Social Media with Topsy

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Posted in Bookmarklet, Firefox, Google Chrome, Internet Explorer, RSS, Safari, Search, Social media and tagged , ,

Finding social media messages is a challenge.  This seems to be particularly true when sifting through the information overload that is Twitter, whose own search engine seems perpetually unable to return relevant results.  It was ameliorated by Google and other realtime search, which would let you reach back beyond the last week or two and see relevant messages in the past.  As each of these realtime search tools goes offline, however, it becomes harder to dig into Twitter’s past.

The New York Times’ Gadgetwise blog has a good suggestion in Topsy.  I mentioned Topsy briefly a few months ago but it is worth taking another look at this tool.  Even forgetting the fact that it is a much stronger search engine than Twitter’s own, it has some other features that make it a good draw.

Researchers will like its advanced search template.  You can specifically include or exclude words, and you can search for posts by a particular user or over a particular time frame.

One feature I like is that Topsy recognizes Twitter messages that link to other content.  If you are looking for messages that link to content posted on www.fictionaldomain.com, you can restrict the search to looking just at messages that link to that site.

Topsy also has an Experts search option.  If you are looking for an individual who is knowledgeable on a particular topic, you can search the experts section and it will return Twitter accounts that are frequently cited by other Twitter accounts for that topic.

It’s not exactly a citation index but it can give you some starting points if you are trying to identify expertise.  It is also not necessarily current.  The expert profiles are drawn from Twitter’s information, and you may want to visit a Twitter account profile to verify that the information is current.

Last but not least, Topsy supports RSS feeds for specific topics and experts.

Tip: Searching for Counsel in Case Law Databases

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Posted in Canada, Case Law, LexisNexis, Screencast, Search, U.S., Westlaw and tagged , , ,

The proprietary legal research databases LexisNexis and Westlaw have structured their case law content so that you can easily dig into select parts of a court’s opinion.  One frequently sought piece of information is to find in which cases your opposing counsel has appeared.  This is a straightforward search, focusing on the counsel segment or field (more on LexisNexis segments, and Westlaw segments).

But what if you are searching other case law sites, particularly the free Legal Information Institutes?  Sometimes the data is not as well structured, so you can’t search just on the counsel or judges segment of the opinions.  Here’s a quick overview on searching using the counsel segment on LexisOne, and then how to craft a text search on CanLII to accomplish nearly the same result.

Mine and Store Twitter Messages

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Posted in Business Information, Search, Twitter, Windows and tagged

There is a huge amount of information being churned out by Twitter users.  Many of the messages are casual, informal communications that you might want to know about.  I’ve already mentioned how you can use Google’s Update search to narrow your keyword search by geographic location.

Visitmix has released a desktop client called Archivist.  You can run a search within the Archivist to retrieve Twitter results related to your keywords:  client or opposing party, corporate executives.  The search is not that unusual, although the results are nicely displayed.  The feature that really helps the researcher is the ability to export your search results to a tab-separated text file, which you can open in Microsoft Excel or other spreadsheets.