New Blekko Search Engine: Uses for Internet Legal Research

You may have heard of the newest search engine, Blekko.   It allows you to add slash tags to limit your results.  For example, age discrimination /date, lists  search results with the most recent date first.   Pandia Search Engine News: Search Engine Blekko, the Hype and the Facts provides a good explanation of how the new search engine works:

“This slashing is done by making lists of trusted web sites in a certain category (like my slashtag for search engine blogs) and then perform(ing) your search within these sites.”

Blekko created  “built in” tags and users can create their own tags.

There is a topics slash tag for /law.   I found the  /law tag  useful to find legal information pertaining to cyberbullying or student newspapers.   But a search for employment discrimination without the  /law tag had many good results which the /law tag search did not have.  You can see what websites are being searched within a tag by clicking on the tag in this list.   People can apply to be editors of particular slash tags, so hopefully more law sites (such as LII) will be added to the /law tag as time goes on.   Also, more legal subject tags may be created by users.

Tags can be combined, such as a search for Ohio governor veto /dr=2007 /blogs, which will search for blog posts from 2007 about vetoes by the governor of Ohio.

Also see Techcrunch: What Can You Do On Blekko That You Can’t Do On Google? (TCTV), and this 3 minute video: Blekko: How to Slash the Web.

Thanks to the Law Librarian Blog.