As a devoted user of most things Google, I was surprised to find that I was unaware of a one of their not-so-new products, that can be useful for attorneys - Google Scholar. Google Scholar is a search engine that only searches scholarly papers for your topic. on a recent test, I googled "COGSA" on Scholar. (the acronym for the Carriage of Goods by Sea Act- for non-maritime readers 46 USC App. 1300 et seq. for those who must know!) I got 16 scholarly articles back with titles such as "Conflict of Laws and the Contractual Rule of Bills of Lading" and "A Piece - Neither a Package nor a Unit". Only 1 result was off-topic for me and apparently there is something called a Core Geometry Selection Aid or CoGSA for short - to aid magnetic designers in the selection of a core geometry - right over my head!
After mentioning this tool to a colleague, I quickly learned that a lot of people don't realize that Google offers many tools in addition to the basic search engine that made them famous.
A quick run down:
Email - Gmail is a great free email application, with a unique way of keeping email threads together. You get 2.5 gigs of storage so you basically never have to delete an email again!
Digital Photos - I index, manipulate, order prints and send copies of all of my photos using Picassa. You will never have to search through dozens of folders for the digital photo you are looking for again.
Translation - Google has a language tool application to help translate German, French, Italian, Portuguese, Chinese, Japanese and Korean to and from English. This is a great tool for maritime lawyers especially, as we always seem to deal with some documents written in a foreign language.
News - Here are three services that I use regularly. First of all, Google News aggregates news from 4500 news services and lays them out in an easy to read home page, plus it is search-able. Second, you can customize the News page to always show the results of a search on your home page. Third, you can use the Google Alerts feature to run your search and send the results to you as an email as often as you like. Think of this as a free clipping service. I have several searches set up in Google Alerts that I use for monitoring the maritime industry as well as anything published about the company I work for.
Maps and Directions - okay Google Maps blows Mapquest out of the water. It combines directions, mapping and satellite imagery in one tool. Check it out the next time you need directions.
I am sure there are many other useful Google Tools - including the controversial Google Desktop - which indexes your hard drive and makes it search-able (for you) through the Google interface. These are just the ones that I use regularly and that I think can be very helpful to the maritime practitioner.
I am sure that many of you were aware of some or all of these tools - if there are others that you use regularly, or you have better ones in mind, plese post your comments and let me know what works for you.
