Legal Research

I'm just starting to catch up on all of the articles that piled up in my Google Reader account over the holidays, so I just read this Christmas day piece from the New York Times on kids and keyword searching.  It's a pretty fascinating look at how children formulate keyword searches and how that process differs from adult keyword searching.  My favorite example:

Google has long known that it can be difficult for users to formulate the right keywords to call up their desired results. But that task can be even more challenging for children, given that they do not always have the right context for thinking about a new subject. One 12-year-old boy searching for information about Costa Rica used the search term ?sweaty clothes? because that was what he associated with the jungle.

The article introduced me to a new Google search display tool that I didn't know about called the Wonder Wheel.  If you run a search, then click "show options" at the top of the search results screen, you'll see a Wonder Wheel option about halfway down the left-side of the next screen.  If you click on Wonder Wheel, you get a graphical representation of your search, which might appeal more to kids and/or those with a visual learning style.  I googled "great white sharks" and my Wonder Wheel result looked like this: