flickriver.com is a Flickr viewer and search tool, searchable by user name, tag, group and place.
If you need a good picture of the Earltown NS general store, or all pictures by DeadFred.com, or a picture of the DEW Line radar picket ship, USS Investigator(AGR-9/YAGR-9), then you can find it through flickriver.com.
I bet you know about Pipl.com. I also bet you don’t know my super secret way of using it.
I have just shown you how to search usernames using three good sites. Now in this limited time offer, I will tell you about the best and most secret username search.
Go to Pipl.com and put the suspected username in the field normally reserved for a person’s name, and presto, right before your very own eyes, valid results will appear that may include a lot of other vital information about your subject.
This searches 160 social network sites for a user name. It is powered by the KnowEm search engine and has the same features of interest to the Investigator as NameChk plus a very interesting feature. It allows you to click on the faded-out links, which indicate that the username is in use, and doing so takes you to the user profile for that username.
Knowem is probably the most comprehensive search site for finding user names & screen names.
NameChk is similar, but it doesn’t search as many sites (158). Be warned, this site doesn’t like Firefox, it is better to use Chrome as a browser.
The advantage of this username search is that it tells you which sites have the username available for use. Conversely, the sites that don’t have the username available might have the user that you are seeking. The sites where the name is taken are the ones that you should investigate further.
Case sensitive searches help when searching a person’s name and certain words such as the month of March, rather than a marching band, or a person from Poland is Polish, not silver polish.
CaseSensitiveSearch.com appeared in April 2013 and provides a case sensitive web search engine based upon the Yahoo! search engine database. However, this search is based on a paid service called BOSS that allows developers to create custom Yahoo! search engines for a fee. In this case, we do not know what pricing plan the developer is on, therefore, we do not know what portion of the Yahoo! index the thing searches.
During the recent apparent demise of Google Alerts, I turned to using Talkwalker and Mention.
I found Talkwalker to be better than the broken-down Google Alerts. Mention seemed interesting, but the Web interface was not confidence inspiring and the need to download an app always makes me suspicious of what security risks that would cause.
Now that Google Alerts is working better, I am finding that it is almost keeping up with Talkwalker and finding new material in each set of results.
With the reawakeing of Google Alerts, I am not going to abandon Talkwalker and Mention — I am just going to add them to toolkit.
Delicious is a social bookmarking site. Social bookmarking is storing and sharing the sites that the user finds interesting. This site has over 6 million users. That makes it a huge catalog of what interests the registered users.
By searching for a topic, you will find users interested in that topic. Topics to search could be a protest, scandal, political movement, or a distinct event. Delicious will identify all the users who bookmarked the same site or sites about the topic. You may also find links to related meet-ups and groups interested in the topic.
Once you have matched a Delicious user-name to a real person, you can see all the sites he or she has bookmarked starting with the most recent. The bookmarks are dated. This will tell a lot about the subject’s interests, skills, plans, education, and employment. The URL of the users bookmarks will be http://delicious.com/user-name/.
All of the foregoing allows you to start building a map of the social network surrounding the topic and the associated people.
This site doesn’t offer anything special, but it works quite well. It doesn’t have a real-time refresh, which I like as it makes examination of the search results less hectic.
The results are dominated by Twitter, but it also searches Facebook, Google Buzz, Digg, and Delicious. I particularly like being able to filter the results by source as this is my starting point for searching Delicious.
Google isn’t a search engine — it’s an advertising engine. Google makes its money from advertising. You may have noticed that the advertisments that appear on your Google search results page is related to what you are searching.
Some of this advertising results from cookies placed on your computer. If you use Gmail, it is even more intrusive as each email is read, and you get ads associated with the content of your email. This is a good business strategy for Google but intrudes upon the user’s privacy. You should shut-off the collection of web history in your Google account. To do this sign into your Google account and then go to http://google.com/history. Once there, click on Remove all Web History and then click on Pause to stop further collection of your web history. There is also a way to rid yourself of the intrusive monitoring of you normal web searching.
Google uses DoubleClick to monitor your web browsing. To eliminate this monitoring go to http://google.com/ads/preferences/plugin and download this small file for each browser that you use. The instalation prceedure will vary with each browser. This file won’t disappear when you use a file wiping program to clearout all the trash web browsing accumulates.
I have written about the site: command in Google before.
The site: command in Google is an invaluable tool for doing Investigative Internet Research (IIR), especially in combination with other advanced operators.
Google site: Tool only works Firefox 14 or later on Windows 7.
It allows you to add site: or -site: to modify your Google search results. To limit your query to a particular site in the results, or to re-run the query excluding that site from the results, click the green URL below the result header. This works best on Google.com rather than the country-specific versions of Google. It also works on the encrypted version of Google.com.
This addon requires Greasemonkey.
A Firefox add-on called Greasemonkey allows you to customize the way a web page displays using small bits of JavaScript.
Boounce is a simple browser add-on available for Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome that helps you bounce between search engines, topical databases, and searchable websites. It mercifully eliminates duplicate results from Google, Bing, and Blekko.
This works quite well if you need to search through a lot of sites quickly. However, you should only use uncomplicated search terms containing words that are not likely to be filtered-out of the results by the default porn filters of the sites you are searching.
If you copy a lot of material while searching, then in the addon’s options deselect “Use text selection as search term”. This is particularly annoying if you cut and paste to MS OneNote as you conduct your research.
One feature I really like is the ability to right-click on webpage search box to add it to the list of boounceable sites.
The list of search sites included with Boounce may be found at http://www.boounce.com/search-engine-list/
If somebody were to monitor my searches, they might think I was an extreme right-wing, communist, racist, radical, or a pervert. I’m not any of that, I’m just doing Investigative Internet Research (IIR).
Search engines have filtering to save you from pornography and extreme views of many kinds. I have no idea who sets the standards for what you can see and what you can’t. I have no idea what they block and what they don’t. I have no idea what they index and what they don’t. I don’t care what they let me see and what they don’t, because I can’t change it. I just do IIR.
A friend of mine was looking for Pig Candy, which is candied bacon — who knew such a thing existed. On his first try using DDG, the following site was blocked: http://www.nakedwhiz.com/pigcandy.htm . This might be termed food-porn, but it doesn’t seem subversive or perverted.
If you look at the page, you will notice the word “naked”. This innocuous word probably filtered-out this page when the default filtering was in place. However, Bing’s default “moderate” filtering allows the page to appear in the results.
Filtering, indexing bias, and censorship are constant problems for the Investigative Internet Researcher. I have a standard set of searches that let me know what will likely be filtered out of my results on that day. Sometimes, in some search engines, setting the filtering to off will not show any improvement in the results. This tells me they don’t index those terms or always filter or censor those terms. The maddening part of all this is that the breadth of the filtering is liable to change from time-to-time — that is why I might appear to be a extreme right-wing, communist, racist, radical, pervert so often.
If you work in an environment where your online activity is monitored — don’t become the company’s extreme right-wing, communist, racist, radical, pervert — search through an encrypted VPN connection.
Serious searchers need a proximity search operator. In Google, it’s an undocumented feature.
The Google proximity operator is AROUND(x) which MUST BE IN CAPS. The number sets the maximum distance between the two terms. To make the operator work properly, you must write it in all capitals and place it between the words. It will return results with variables of the words such as plurals, etc., as is normal for Google.
This operator is handy when the combination of search terms is dominated by one term, but you’re interested in the relationship between two query terms. This is particularly important when searching names. A person’s name may appear with a middle initial in some instances and without it in other instances. This operator will find both instances. It will also be very helpful is the person’s last name is common or also used by another prominent person.
If you want to see all the Tweets from a particular Twitter account, then you are out of luck if you don’t know about Snap Bird. Twitter allows you to only search or see about a week’s worth of Tweets.
Snap Bird allows you to survey all the Tweets for a particular user if you select “Someone’s timeline” as the type of search.
This is extremely useful when trying to assess the nature of the person behind the Twitter account. Sometimes, you will find that the account is really just a bot that retweets what it finds. Sometimes, you find the account is owned by somebody with an axe to grind. Sometimes, you find the person behind the account is an activist of some type. You learn these things from reviewing all the tweets to see the general theme of the account.
The point is, you won’t know what you’re dealing with unless you can see all the Tweets coming from that account and Snap Bird allows you to do that.
One of my favourite search engines for Twitter is Topsy which indexes and ranks search results based upon the most influential conversations occurring every day about each specific term, topic, page or domain queried.
I have been using this for almost two years as my go-to search engine for tweets about issues that currently interest my clients.