Ever face a similar online roadblock?

Hey @MIStateBar @MISupremeCourt @shemkalegal , any idea what case citation this is? From the July 19 SBM NewsLinks email. Behind a paywall though. Super curious to read the opinion though. Thank you!! pic.twitter.com/i9gGekn2Yf

— Silvia Alexandria Mansoor (@SilviaMansoor) July 24, 2021

The known info of this Michigan Court of Appeals decision was limited

The court website’s search features were not helpful for Silvia.

But the original post shared enough info for me to effectively use Google search operators and quickly find the answer.

I've started to lean hard on Google search operators, independent of internal site search boxes. Toss this into your Google search bar and see what happens:

site:https://t.co/ChQbLLVveU 2021 AND “Court of Appeals” AND “Department of Transportation” AND bicycle filetype:pdf

— Lori Shemka (@shemkalegal) July 24, 2021

This argument instructs:

Only look at the Michigan courts site
Only look at pdf files
Must include all these terms w/n the file

— Lori Shemka (@shemkalegal) July 24, 2021

For me, helpful Google search operators include:

• “search term in quotes” forces an exact-match search
• OR or | searches for X or Y or both
• AND searches for X and Y
• plus sign “+” immediately before a word (no space) ensures that your specific search term will show up in the search results. +Michigan
• minus sign “–” immediately before a word (no space) ensures that your specific search term will be excluded from the search results. -Chevy
• ( ) Group multiple terms or search operators to control how the search is executed. Example: (opinion OR order) court
• filetype: Restrict results to a certain filetype. E.g., PDF, DOCX, TXT, PPT, etc. Example: filetype:pdf (no space)
• site: Limit results to those from a specific website. Example: site:courts.mi.gov (no space)
• AROUND(X) Proximity search. Find pages containing two words or phrases within X words of each other. Example: motion AROUND(4) granted