Working in a law firm there will come a time when you are asked to do research that goes against your personal morals. Law firms have the potential to deal with controversial issues, that you may personally find uncomfortable.  These could be religious, environmental, personal/human rights issues or even just situations or topics that you don’t necessarily disagree with but find uncomfortable anyway.

Hopefully, this is something that you’ll only experience very rarely.  But how to deal with it when it does happen?

I’ve been pretty lucky in my career that I’ve been able to mostly avoid this happening. But ever since the first time it did, I’ve been aware that it might happen to me again. The first time I was able to avoid asking too many questions about why a particular piece of research was needed, and only had to do a very superficial job.  Next time, I might not be so lucky so I thought I’d brainstorm a few ways of dealing with it.

1.  Pass it on to a colleague. This is not so useful if you are in a one person library, or the sole researcher. But there is the possibility that one of your coworkers may not feel as strongly about an issue as you do.
2. Stand up and say something to the person who requested it. This probably isn’t a very good option, but you could at least make your feelings known. If you’re lucky, the requester might be someone who’s willing to pass the research onto a trainee, or even do it themselves. This does have the potential of backfiring unfortunately but could gain you respect as someone who stands up for what they believe in even if in the end you end up doing the research anyway.
3. Say nothing and do the research. This rankles with me, but if option one fails, this is the option I think I’d be most likely to go with unfortunately.  I don’t personally think I have the confidence yet to stand up to someone and say that no I’m not doing that piece of research.

And then I come to a screeching halt. So, is this something that any of you have had to deal with? And if so, what was your strategy?

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I’m always interested when new search engines are released. Not because I use them (it’s the boring choice, I know, but Google really does tend to meet my search needs better than the alternatives), but it is nice to see the ways people are trying to manipulate the area. There are some really interesting and inventive search engines being produced now - the focus seems to be more on highlighting the difference and niche aspects of different search engines, rather than trying to produce a GoogleClone.

Chipwrapper is a Google custom search engine encompassing the major UK broadsheets. It isn’t new I understand, but as I hadn’t seen it before, I thought I’d pass it on anyway. It searches across The Daily Express, Daily Mail, Daily Mirror, Financial Times, The Guardian, The Independent, The Sun, The Telegraph and The Times, and is actually pretty successful at finding articles that the newspapers own search engines fail at turning up. I’ve not spent a lot of time investigating custom search engines, but this is a pretty cool use for them, and I’ve found that I’ve used it a fair bit since I found it.

FuzzFind is a combined search engine that searches across Google, Yahoo, MSN Live and del.icio.us. You can then choose the weighting you want to give a particular search engine, which is actually pretty neat. By heavily weighting del.icio.us in particular, you get access to links that otherwise probably wouldn’t have come up. It shows you what ranking a particular response has in each search engine, as well as how many times the url has been bookmarked on del.icio.us, which could be quite useful.

Wikia is the search engine brainchild of Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales. It is self-statedly imperfect at the moment - results appear erratic and almost unsorted. The idea behind it being that user-moderated results will ultimately be more useful than those generated purely by algorithm. It isn’t brilliant yet though. The first hit when you search for ‘apple’ is the QuickTime download page, which, whilst close, isn’t quite right. More uncommon queries don’t get you anywhere just yet - the first hit for ‘European Court of Justice’ is to an article about the Protection of Fundamental Rights in the European Community, which is probably not what you’re actually after. It’s an ambitious concept though, and I’m curious to see how it turns out. I expect, given the collaborative nature of it, that commonly searched for terms will probably end up being fine, but that more complicated searches will never really work on it. It reminds me quite a bit of Maholo, which never particularly interested me either, but Wikia functions more as a wiki than a portal.

I’m curious to know if anyone else really uses other search engines on a day to day basis. Tools like this are great, and it’s really handy to know that they’re there, but I tend not to use anything other than Google. Does anyone have any suggestions for search engines that they absolutely couldn’t do without?

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