frav_eu2.htm: Fravia's web-searching lore how to find quickly any EU & UN document

MARCH 2009: OBSOLETE PAGE: confer machine_translation and googlex instead

Quid faciant leges, ubi sola pecunia regnat?

I have created the following masks in order to allow *anyone* to quickly fetch any EU (or United Nations') document, bypassing the labyrinthical slowness of the EU-servers and the clumsiness of their slow search engines.
To know HOW TO QUICKLY FIND *any* legislation piece is part of the cosmic power of the seekers, and the EU proposals, directives and regulations have binding legislative power in 25 european states. Hence they MUST be translated in all their (20) languages. This is of PARAMOUNT importance for seekers because it opens an incredible wealth of human made (non machine) TRANSLATIONS. Thus, if you search for, say, client side, you'll find out how to further widen your search using this same queryterm, on a local level through 19 other languages (three more will follow soon).
Of course even simply knowing how to find a given legislative text is important. In all human societies, the abstruse formulations, infinite number and technical complexity of all kind of national and supranational laws are purposely pursued in order to allow loopholes for the powerful and bondages for the unwashed. Nothing new under the sun: Corruptissima republica, plurimae leges :-)
Hence it could be useful, for all civil society and "grass root" organisations as well, to check quickly and easily the laws that (are supposed to) rule a world "ubi sola pecunia regnat".
Through the following masks any reader will be able to find any EU legsilative text using words, numbers, text snippets or a combination of these elements.
Everything on this page, that supersedes the now obsolete how to find - and link to - any EU-document, is client side, so you can just save this html file on your own box and use it at leisure wherever you are or might be.
I know that there are many agencies in the 25 member States of the EU that make money in order to "find" EU-laws for those simpletons unable to search inside the legislative labyrinths. Through these simple, free and GPLled very powerful masks I hope to put all such agencies out of work for ever :-)
Enjoy!
Fravia+

Googlex & Company (Version 2.3)

Find quickly any European Union (or United Nations) document

Googlex
eu servers

Yahoolex
eu servers

Googun
un.org

Official Journals
w/o europa

Caveat
emptor

input a (possibly long) searchstring in any language and fetch quickly your results from the eu servers or from google's cache

Try for instance "a strategy for the sustainable development of european aquaculture" (with or without quotes).
Clearly, if you are seeking something specific, you'll have to specify your string a little more. A simple date may do the job:
"24 octobre 2003" "Une stratégie pour le développement durable de l'aquaculture européenne"
will probably show among the first results the official journal C 256 you were looking for (note the double quotes).
(Of course, if you'r lucky, you'll fetch the same OJ C 256 just digiting "2003 C 256" and hitting the "I'm feeling lucky" button)
See also Introducing Goog-lex

input a (possibly long) searchstring in any language and fetch quickly your results from the eu servers or from yahoo's cache

Try for instance "a strategy for the sustainable development of european aquaculture" (with or without quotes).
Clearly, if you are seeking something specific, you'll have to specify your string a little more. A simple date may do the job:
"24 Oktober 2003" "Eine Strategie für die nachhaltige Entwicklung der europäischen Aquakultur"
will probably show among the first results the official journal C 256 you were looking for (note the double quotes).
(Of course you'll also fetch the same OJ C 256 just digiting "2003 C 256")
See also Introducing Goog-lex

googun (Most UN-documents)

Version .01

Try for instance "well being of present and future generations" 2005, or "el desarrollo, la seguridad y los derechos humanos"

See also Introducing Googun

Official Journals
Official Journals quick retrieval (With or without the Europa server)

It could be useful to show on this page, for the sake of completeness, how to search a OJ in any language just using googlex.

In fact you will (very very often) fetch any linguistic version of any Official Journal using simple ad hoc strings in Googlex. Here some examples...

Official Journal "L 12" 2005
or
Gazzetta Ufficiale "C 12" 2005

Note that you'll (often enough) GET YOUR OJ AT ONCE (from the Europa server) if you use the "I'm feeling lucky" option. Here an example: for OJ C 111 2004 just digit "2004 C 111" and hit the "I'm feeling lucky" button, that's it. For the same document in spanish, add -say- "Diario Oficial": "2004 C 111" Diario Oficial. That's it, muy cool.
If you use the normal "Googlex Search" button, you'll (often enough) find -underneath the results- the possiibility to retrieve Google's cached copy even if the Europa server is slow, agonizing or down
(Syntax! There is a space between the letters "C" or "L" and the OJ-number you'r retrieving and there are quotes there)

"Celex is half-frozen, eur-lex is as slow as a turtle... can't we fetch quickly EU-documents nevertheless?"

~ Introducing Goog-lex ~

The "Googlex" mask and its companions represent a complete, powerful & quick "client-side" EU-documents retrieval system, that anyone could use anywhere, at home or in the office.
The Googlex mask basically limits per default google searches to the europa.eu.int server, harnessing the might (and the speed) of the "web at large" for our own terminological searching purposes.
Note that you don't need to accept the default and in most cases most useful europa.eu.int option: you can instead choose either eu.int (broader search, greps every eu server), or choose a server ad hoc: esc.eu.int, cor.eu.int, www.europarl.eu.int, www.curia.eu.int (narrow, server specific search).

These forms also give back 100 (instead of the default 10) results per page and guarantee that no results regrouping algos will be applied.
Another filter imposes the UTF-8 charset (most accented characters are thus allowed)

~ You don't need to do diddly ~
You don't need to choose a language, you don't need to fill different fields, nor to choose any further option.
Nothing, nada, niente. Just input a (possibly long) searchstring in any language and fetch quickly your results.
Try for instance "a strategy for the sustainable development of european aquaculture" (with or without quotes).
Clearly, if you are seeking something specific, you'll have to specify your string a little more. A simple date may do the job:
"24 October 2003" "a strategy for the sustainable development of european aquaculture"
will probably show among the first results the official journal C 256 you were looking for (note the double quotes).

And if you don't remember how to spell the word aquaculture or don't recall any more if that funky "development" was sustainable or else, just use asterisks instead: "a strategy for the * development of european *" will give you good results as well.

Of course if you want a different linguistic version, you'll just input a different string, duh:
"24 Ottobre 2003" "Una strategia per lo sviluppo sostenibile dell'acquacoltura europea"
or, alternatively
you may simply change on the fly the address' URL of the version you searched first into another linguistic version
for instance
europa.eu.int/eur-lex/accessible/en/archive/2003/c_25620031024en.html
into
europa.eu.int/eur-lex/accessible/it/archive/2003/c_25620031024it.html
Here the codes: en, fr, de, it, nl, es, el, pt, sv, da, fi, cs, et, lv, lt, hu, mt, pl, sk, sl.

Of course when searching you can mix up text and numbers and search using any numerical reference you like, for instance: Commission Regulation 1171/2001
(or Verordening 1171/2001 van de Commissie if you want the Dutch version).

~ Another added advantage ~
At times the Europa server does not work, gets stuck, appears very slow, dies in agony. In that case, if at all possible, do retrieve google's cached copy of your target document instead.
Very often (but not always), after having searched, you'll see a small cached link underneath each result, next to another similar pages small link.
Not only using google cache you'll retrieve a copy of your target document using a battery of (much) better and quicker servers than our ones, but your search term occurrences will be highlighted in yellow inside the retrieved document: try this useful, quick and elegant trick.

~ Less problems with accented characters and other non kosher signs ~
Most accented characters are accepted in these masks.
However, at times, when you paste a long phrase inside the masks, some "non kosher" characters may still be misrecognized (coz of the iso-8859-1 charset when pasting).
If a search does not give results and you see a question mark or some other funny character instead of an accented character, either rewrite it on the fly inside the searchmask, or, simply, use one asterisk instead of each offending term, for instance "résidus" and "présents" in the following search:
"limites maximales applicables aux * de pesticides * dans les produits"

You may also use more asterisks and omit the quotes in order to widen your search. For instance limites maximales applicables aux *** de pesticides *** produits

Alternatively, search in English and then switch to your language of choice once the target document has been found.
In many cases this may be the best solution for funky alphabets.

~ I'm feeling lucky ~
The "I'm feeling lucky" button works using a different algo and delivers "the result" you're looking for at once... provided you are lucky. Try 2001/C 123/16 for instance, or try Opinion of the Committee of the Regions on the "Proposal for a Council Regulation establishing common rules for direct support schemes under the common agricultural policy and support schemes for producers of certain crops", you'll be most of the time pretty lucky indeed :-)

~ Woah! Can I use this at home? ~
Of course. The whole point of these masks is to allow anybody to quickly access (almost) any EU-document, whenever and wherever and for whatsoever reason.
Just save this html file (rightclick: goomasks.htm).
For esthetical reasons you may decide to save the three images above as well (rightclick on the images themselves: googlexsmall1.jpg, yahoolex.png, googun.jpg).
Save everything inside a single ad hoc folder, bookmark goomasks.htm and you'r ready to rock.

~ Is that all? ~
Nope. For the joy of english, french, spanish, russian, chinese or arabic interested we have also created googun, zapping the United nations database.

~ Is that all? ~
Nope. In order to use a different index of EU-documents we have also created Yahoolex, thus offering a second DIFFERENT possibility to zap the EU-servers through yahoo's index and muscles (and cached pages).

~ Is that all? ~
Nope. Ritz has developed some "experimental" tools for bilingual display: bilingual_bookmarklets.htm.
They are still in fieri, be warned, but you can use them already (for instance at home) if you use/will use the powerful, good, free and quick Opera browser (a browser you should use anyway). The bilingual display cannot work with Microsoft explorer due to its (awful) proprietary code.

~ Caveat emptor ~
Google does NOT seem to have indexed all tiers inside the EU-servers, (though it went pretty deep inside). The same applies to Yahoo's (different) index. So if you want completeness and absolute certainity, forget it: the tools above are "quick and dirty": they work, they are quick, but there's no garanty of document retrieval completeness.
Moreover, Google's and Yahoo's indexing spiders have a two-weeks lap delay, which means that some of the most recent documents -while already accessible on the EU-servers- may not appear at all using googlex searches.
This kind of mustard-cutting is still rather new and in fieri, so bear with us and use it for what it is worth.