Parkinson’s Law states that work expands to fill the time allotted.
Efficient online searching dictates that you set time limits for each search. If you don’t, the time allotted will be infinite and the job will expand to fill all the time you have and more.
Defeat Parkinson and His Damn Law
The first step to preventing Parkinson’s Law from taking over your life is to fully understand what you are really looking for. As an Investigator, I will normally look for data on people or companies; each has a name, address, telephone number, and fax number. This is how I search for this data on the Internet and compile the results in the shortest possible time.
The Assembly Line
The purpose of the “Assembly Line” is to be certain that I search using all relevant search terms while keeping good records of the date and URL’s where I find things. The collected material will be well organised for easy report production. Hence the title, Assembly Line Searching.
OneNote
Once I have the above search terms, I enter them in MS OneNote with each item (search statement) on a separate line of the first page of a new folder. The first page of the OneNote folder will show what I searched and allows me to cut and paste each item into the search box. (With Ditto I need only copy the search terms once.) In this folder, I compile my findings by creating a page for each search term. OneNote captures the date and URL of the relevant results.
Each search opens a new tab when I paste the search term into the Google search box. I control my Google preferences with Google Toolbar for FireFox and Customize Google. I go through the Google results and copy the relevant Google results onto the appropriate OneNote page and then include the corresponding part of the relevant web page identified by Google. This preserves the search statements, URL’s, and date the data was found.
Copernic
The next station on the assembly line is Copernic. I use this to create MSWord report on the same search terms. I set it to record 50 results from each search engine while eliminating duplicates. Interesting, but dead links, get explored in the search engine and other Internet cache sites.
Craigslist
On to Craigslist for searches of the all the search terms using CLDesktop. I’m often surprised by what I find here. With company names, I sometimes find derogatory comments in the jobs section. Sometimes I find apartments to rent at an address or by telephone number.
Then I continue by searching Twitter for company names, the names of people, and corporate addresses. Over the past year I have found a company or person that I’m investigating mentioned in a Tweet.
Social Networks
Finally, I open my list of social network search engines, including yoName and Spock and the like , one in each tab. I search by the name of the company or person here. I go from one to the other with the same search term collecting the results as with Google, then start over with the next search term.
Audio & Video
Finally, Everyzing and Trooker which index words within audio and video files.
The Report
The report is created in MSWord using the material compiled in OneNote and Copernic.
Great tips Richard. Thanks. Do you have a sample report you can share to show how all of this comes together?
I can’t supply examples from my files for obvious reasons.
Normally a report will start with the Mandate that identifies the primary subject. Then the summary and recommendations will follow.
In the next section the research findings will be organized by starting with the primary subject with sub-headings for the related items like addresses and phone numbers.
Related people and companies will follow with sub-head for searches related to these.
The relevance or significance of each element will be summarized in Summary and in within the research section.
The summary will often include an i2 chart or a similar network diagram to illustrate the relationships.
I try to paste the content of the OneNote pages into the report as this will include the citation data. I do the editing and formatting in OneNote. If the styles of both OneNote and Word are the same it requires little work. Spend some time creating good report templates and set-up OneNote to work with the templates. Once the templates are created put them on a CD and keep them for the day they become corrupted on your computer.