“scofflaw swimming pools” is the search phrase for this week…
Google Earth Used To Find Unlicensed Pools
A town on New York’s Long Island is using Google Earth to find backyard pools that don’t have the proper permits.
Archive for the 'Search Engines' Category
This is how to built yourself a very robust personal Intelligence Agency. Every intelligence agency in the world tracks key words, information patterns, and news events from a central aggregated location.
- Create a Google account while being discrete with the information you put in the profile.
- Log on to your Google account and in the top left of the screen go to more then down to even more and select Alerts, which appears as the first link on the More Google Products page. Set up a number of these alerts for “news” and “blogs” based on your search terms. Set each of these to “as-it-happens” to e-mail you with a link to the article.
- Set up your smart phone to receive these alerts, and code the incoming messages with a special sound. You’ll then get a specific sound on your smart phone with each Google Alert.
- Establish a Google Reader account. Subscribe to all the blogs you can find on your topics of interest. Google Reader includes a search bar to help search through the dross to find the good stuff. You now have an online central location from which you can manage your information intake.
- Over time, add more and more RSS feeds. Intelligence agencies have them, and so should you. You will be surprised Google Reader and the Google Alerts you will consistently outperform major news organizations in bring actionable intelligence to your attention. The may give you a competitive edge.
- Check your favorite blogs and and those that they are linking to consistently. Add these RSS feeds to your reader. Check the blog rolls of the blogs to which you subscribe and add all of their RSS feeds to your reader. To vet these new sources, use the reader’s search facility.
The Ixquick search engine results appear normal, but underneath each link description a Proxy link appears. Clicking it gets the website through an anonymous proxy. The page will load slower when viewed through the proxy, but if privacy is important, then you probably won’t mind the wait.
The search results aren’t as good as you would get from the large search engines, but the proxy thing is quick, handy, and just simply cool. The problem I see is that it only displays an artificially small set of results for your search. For example, 64 unique results selected from at least 1,121,619,121 matching results for “intel”. You only get 64 hits — nothing more.
GoogleGuide is one of those things you find and say, “why didn’t I think of that.” If you need a guide to using Google’s advanced search operators, then bookmark the table that lists the search operators that work with each Google search service.
SlideFinder.net offers a search engine powered by Slide Executive, a PowerPoint software and tools company.
Searching “McEachin” in Google I get 37 hits. Doing the same search in SlideFinder, I get one hit. In the Google results, the SlideFinder result appears third from the bottom with a different file name than found by SlideFinder.
According the SlideFinder blog, they concentrate on indexing presentations from university websites as these “will often contain high quality content.” The blog is worth following if you regularly search for PowerPoint presentations.
This thing works very well for finding references to company names and Web sites. The person who prepared the presentation usually knows things that interest me. It’s usually easy to find the person who made the PowerPoint file. Write-out my questions, make a telephone call, get answers, write report, and move on to the next job.
FindThatFile
Previously, I wrote about file searches using OSUN.ORG.
findthatfile.com provides a file search encompassing Web, FTP, Usenet, Metalink and P2P resources (ed2k/emule) including 47 file types and 554+ file extensions including over 167 file upload services. It also offers an alert service sent to your email.
However, not all information in the search database has every property you might be searching for, therefore, you have to explore the different ways to search for the file in the advanced search screen.
In my experience, this is not a good search engine to use to search by a person’s name or a company name. The files are not well indexed in this fashion. One must also be careful to select the “All Files” button in the “Adult Filter” to be sure all the files found appear in the search results.
I usually search by a file name for other versions of a file that I already know about. In some cases, findthatfile.com will give me an understanding of how widely circulated a file may be, or turn-up different versions of the same file.
Better off with Bing
This excellent article by Lawrence Solomon illustrates why a researcher or investigator must use more than one search engine.
Googlegate: The search engine may be standing up to Chinese censors. What about Google’s own censors?
Search for “Googlegate” on Google and you’ll get a paltry result (my result yesterday was 29,300). Search for “Googlegate” on Bing, Microsoft’s search engine competitor, and the result numbers an eye-popping 72.4 million. If you’re a regular Google user, as opposed to a Bing user, you might not even know that “Googlegate” has been a hot topic for years in the blogosphere — that’s the power that comes of being able to control information.
… Google began to minimize the Climategate scandal by hiding Climategate pages from its users.
Bing, in contrast, didn’t make climategate pages disappear. As you’d expect from a search engine that wasn’t manipulating data, search results on Bing climbed steadily until they peaked at around 51 million…
Searching for specific terms in indexed documents on the Web is something many searchers fail to do. It is amazing what you can find when you go looking for it. I’ve written about searching by file type before. Now I have found a search engine for .pdf, .doc, and .ppt files.
OSUN.ORG
OSUN.ORG provides a simple interface for searching PDF documents, MSWord documents, and PowerPoint files. The large search engines allow one to search more file types and you must search one file type at a time using OSUN.ORG as you do in Google. I don’t know what database this search engine uses, but it doesn’t compare very well with Google. A search for my name in PDF files give 52 results in Google and only 9 in OSUN.ORG. This is not a good performance.
Sometimes it’s really hard to find an alternative to the big three search engines.
DevilFinder
According to the site, DevilFinder began as a project to display results from search engines like Google and Yahoo without setting cookies while presenting fewer pages of results. It does not collect search data from users and no invasive cookies or JavaScript is used.
DevilFinder seems to rank the search results on the search term alone, rather than a combination of relevance and the popularity of the site. This is why relevant results from less popular sites may appear at the top. It is might also be the reason the result set is so small. DevilFinder shows the results arranged 100 per page and I rarely get more than 2 pages.
The Image search works quite well. The images are much larger than other search engines. The Video search only returned hits from Youtube for any search I have done – not exactly useful. To be fair the Video search seems to be a new feature. The News tab is just a crude collection of feeds that aren’t searchable.
Search Strategy
This has become a favorite choice for searching the names of people and companies. The results often provide more useful sites in the first page than Google and I don’t have to go to the last page of results to find out what wasn’t searched, as I do with Google.
For long, complex search statements, I still rely on Google, Bing, and Yahoo!, but for searching names and some other common short search statements, DevilFinder does an excellent job and sometimes a better job than the big guys.
Gazopa allows you to upload an image from your computer, enter an image URL, search for keywords, or even draw one yourself. The similarity is based on a color and shape match. This actually works on occasion.
In my experience, Gazopa is much better in matching pictures than BYO Image Search which searches for color palette similarity.
Social Media Monitoring
As an Investigator, you must realise that even the Vatican uses social media. Some forms of social media are taking on some of the characteristics of email. This information rich environment is something that Investigators and Researchers must understand. To be effective, one must also understand the tools available to conduct thorough research of the social media content.
One must also be able to create accurate budgets for this type of research. To set-up, optimise, and monitor research feeds that cover multiple social media and news sites can take many hours. These services allow one to monitor the social media space for new data or derogatory content. One particular strength of these services is that they search Blog comments, and can track comments and posts of individual contributors. While these services are aimed at PR agencies, they also offer significant utility for the Investigator, but they can be very expensive tools to use.
Techrigy
Techrigy (pronounced tek-err-jee) offers a free account that gets you up to 5 Search Words/Phrases, and store up to 1000 results. This is a great way to learn how to use the system.
Radian6
Unfortunately Radian6 is expensive — you pay just to have it in your toolbox, and then pay more for each social media research project you undertake. These costs must be understood at the outset and budgeted into the costs of the Investigation.
Filtrbox
Unfortunately, at Filtrbox their annual fee for individuals appears to be $1,000USD.
Backtype
Backtype lets you search comments that mention a brand, company, or topic, but it also lets you search comments left by a particular person.
Attaain
AttaainCI costs $150 per month for unlimited searching and monitoring. It’s less sophisticated than Radian 6 and Filtrbox which rate Blog comments from positive to negative. This is aimed at the Competitive Intelligence professional rather than the PR agency.
Searching Boards, Forums, and Social Media sites can be a hit and miss affair using the large search engines. Google does an excellent job, but it is not the only game in town.
BoardTracker
BoardTracker – searches across 37,000 forums representing more than 63 million threads. Set up your own custom alerts using RSS or use the site’s search function.
SocialMention
SocialMention – this will find your search term in many different blogs and social outlets. It will tell you how many times a keyword was used, the time frame, and let you subscribe to an RSS feed for that term or export the information as a CSV file.
In Real-time Search Engine, I looked at a Meta search engine called Colecta that is useful for real-time monitoring certain types of sites. Now I will look at monitoring changes in sites that interest you.
Copernic Tracker
Copernic Tracker – automatically looks for new content on Web pages, forums, and Social sites. When a change is detected, our Web site tracking software can notify you by sending an email, including a copy of the Web page with the changes highlighted, or by displaying a desktop alert.
WatchThatPage
WatchThatPage is a service that enables you to automatically collect new information from your favorite pages on the Internet. You select which pages to monitor, and WatchThatPage will find which pages have changed, and collect all the new content for you. The new information is presented to you in an email and/or a personal web page. You can specify when the changes will be collected, so they are fresh when you want to read them. The service is free!
Yahoo Pipes is an interactive feed aggregator and manipulator. Using Pipes, you can create feeds that are more powerful, useful and relevant.
Yahoo Pipes is a free online service that lets you remix popular feed types and create data mashups using a visual editor. A Web mashup is a Web application that combines data from more than one Web data source into a single integrated Web application. Yahoo Pipes combines several different data sources but is generally not sufficient to create a useful application, it is a data mashup tool rather than a complete mashup editor.
How-to videos abound to act as tutorials on using Pipes. The best I found was here. You might also read Working with Yahoo! Pipes, No Programming Required.
It’s amazing what you can find on the Internet…
Clicker Video Search Engine
But really, if you’re looking for some useful video, Clicker catalogs online broadcast programming, along with TV-quality Web originals; it’s part directory, part search engine, and part wiki. Every show and episode comes with pictures, descriptions, tags, categories, cast members, airdates, related shows, programming notes.
Clicker contains more than 450,000 episodes, from over 6,000 shows, from over 1,200 networks, tens of thousands of movies, and 50,000 music videos from 20,000 artists.