Sunday, October 19, 2025

You'll Feel Like a Secret Agent

Here's a bar bet fact.  Did you know that every day, all around the world, Google.com processes 8 BILLION queries?  Of those 8 billion search queries using the general search bar at Google.com, only about 0.1% use Advanced Search.

Wait, what???  

At about the point, you should be asking yourself, what's Advanced Search?!  As noted, there are a few ways to search Google.  First is to conduct a general, natural language search using the general search bar at Google.com which is what 7.992 billion users do daily.  The other 8 million savvy users use the Advanced Search features.  While most all browsers have advance search features,  Google has a couple other features up its sleeves to help you get what you're looking for/at.

Before I get into this, I have to warn you, dear reader, that what I'm about to expose you to is pretty deep state sort of stuff.  Most people are happy to live their lives in utter ignorance.  For the rest of us, just getting along isn't enough.  So, ONLY if you're willing to be 1,000,000,000.9% vested, you might want to hit the pause button here, take the blue pill and go back to to your "regular"  programming.

For the rest of you...

To help understand the difference between "Regular" searching and "Advanced Search," we have to look at results.

Let's run a search using the "normal" search bar in google and run a search for: 

Law cases since 2005 where an amusement park was held liable for injuries to guests 

While Google doesn't say how many results were returned anymore, you do get an inkling that you got a lot of stuff that may or may not be directly relevant to what you're looking for/at:


The thing with Google is that anything after the first page is going to be questionable.  It might be relevant but probably isn't and it gets more and more frustrating the further away you get from that first page of results.
 
Now, let's run a search in Advanced Search.  To do this, Type Advance Search in the Google Search bar, thus:
 

Hit Enter and you'll get (or should get):
 

 Click "Advanced Search" and you'll see:
 
For this search, we're going to be using the rows:
  • All These Words
  • This Exact Word or Phrase
  • Any of These Words
  • Numbers Ranging From
Using our above search (Law cases since 2005 where an amusement park was held liable for injuries to guests), we can extract a few keywords to help our search.
Under "All These Words," I'm going to enter the words:  negligence liable.   A simple definition of negligence is you didn't mean to do it.  A simple definition of liable is that you are responsible.  I want these words because they form the basis of most injury cases.  Also, just because you didn't mean to do it (or something), doesn't mean you aren't liable for injuries to another.
 
Under "This Exact Word or Phrase," I'm going to search for: "amusement park" or "theme park" or "held liable."  I put quotes around two or more words because I want to keep those two words together in just that order (i.e. I don't want park amusement because that doesn't make sense).  Also, I'm using the word "or" to indicate that I'll take what I can get.  Like a hail Mary pass
 
Under "Any of These Words," I'm going to enter: injuries injury accident harm death.  Notice that I don't use commas between the words.  I've just gotten in the habit of not using commas and just type the words as I need.
 
Finally, under "Numbers Ranging From," I'll use my date range of cases from 2005 to 2025.
 

 Hit enter and you'll get something that looks like:
 

While this is just the AI summary of the results, we can see several of our search terms like "Amusement park," "held liable," injuries, and negligence.  As we scroll down, we can find results related to our search query:
 
As you look at each result, you can see our search terms specific to our search as well as the years (which are within our search parameter of 2005-2025).
 
The problem with all this is that while nice, these results don't actually get us what we're seeking.  Specifically, we were looking for legal CASES related to injuries at amusement parks.
 
To see cases FOR FREE, we're going to need to search under Scholar.Google.com.  To get there, simply search for scholar.google.com in the search bar, hit enter and voila! 


What you should notice is options.  If you want to search for general scholarly articles, select "Articles."  If what you want is case law (as is what we're looking for, here), select "Case Law."
 
When you select Case Law, you will be give another set of options.  Specifically, do you want cases from Federal courts, courts from the jurisdiction from where you are using Google (since I am presently in Utah, "Utah courts" is identified), or would you like to select cases from other jurisdictions (i.e. "Select courts").
 
While there are amusement or theme parks in Utah, it isn't well known to have such.  So, let's expand our search to include Cases from California (theme park of the nation), Florida, Texas, and South Carolina.  Then we'll type in our search query with a bunch of "OR" statements:
 
Hit enter and you'll get something that looks like:


Two things to note.  First, scrolling down, you'll find cases from California, Texas, Utah, Florida, and South Carolina and some federal cases (which are the jurisdictions we selected to specifically search).  You can also select any year(s) between 2005-2025.
 
The other thing to note is that you'll see me saying "you'll see something like..." What this means is that every time I hit enter, the results I get are going to be a little different.  If you were to run the same search using the same parameters in another month, you'll get different results.  It's not that the results are wrong - just updated from when I ran my search.
 
And there you have it.  Dark deep search techniques available to everyone but used only by the few, the proud, the research gods.
 
Do this long enough and you start getting goose bumps.

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