This personalised search relevance is a boon for advertisers that want your attention. Google isn’t the first to do this. In 2010 Bing began ranking sites in search results based upon how many of your Facebook friends “like” the site.

The search engines and advertisers have decided that people want to search for other people and their opinions over other content. How convenient for the search engines and advertisers!

If you want a full explanation of the impact this will have for the Investigator, then read Phil Bradley’s article titled Why Google Search Plus is a disaster for search. Google is no longer my first choice, I start with Bing, then DuckDuckGo, and last but not least, I search Blekko.

RTBot provides content only for specific topics such as concepts, subjects, personalities, events, places, companies, products, etc., but not for broader, unspecific searches.

If you use this properly, you often get a lot of video in the results that would require separate searches to find. This can be quite useful when searching by a company or person name.

Evidently Google thinks you aren’t smart enough to use such advanced stuff.  If you really want to find the advanced search page you have to start your search first and then go all the way to the bottom of the SIRP where you will find a link to advanced search.

Under the guise of “people don’t use it”, the similar pages and links to a specific page (backlinks) options have been removed.  Now why would anybody want those nasty things anyway?

Similar Pages

Similar pages now have to be searched using SimilarPages.com and WhoIsLike.it.  This type of search is important to the expert searcher to develop search syntax and to find other players in a given market. The Google search syntax related:www.ConfidentialResource.com is most often a poor substitute for the above search engines.

Backlinks

To find the sites linking to a particular page you have to do it in the main search box using the Google search syntax,  link:ConfidentialResource.com.  Google’s link command isn’t very useful because Google collects so few backlinks. Bing is no help with backlinks. Yahoo closed its Site Explorer some time ago.  It might seem like searching backlinks is now limited to the scant Google results or nothing if you don’t have SEO tools on hand. Fortunately, that is not true.

Blekko Backlinks to the Rescue

Blekko is an excellent alternative for finding backlinks.

The search syntax is to use their slashtags /links or /domainlinks with a URL or domain name. The /links slashtag will find pages that link to a particular page whereas the /domainlinks slashtag finds all inbound links to a particular site.

The second route is via your search results. At the end of each search result is a downwards pointing arrow labelled SEO. Click on this and select links from the pop-up box. This creates a /links search syntax for the page given in the search result.

ReverseInternet.com Backlinks

We have also used ReverseInternet.com successfully. Search by the domain name, then select [backlinks] next to the domain name in the resulting table.  At the top right of the backlinks table, select External Only: On to get the external backlinks.

Recently, Google stopped paying Mozilla for the little Google search window at the top right of the Firefox browser.  Google has paid Mozilla about $1 per copy to have that window. Last year, that Google search window accounted for 84% of Mozilla’s $123 million of revenue, or about $100 million. However, Google’s Chrome browser has made remarkable strides against Firefox and the rest of the the browser field.

The loss of funding to support FireFox, and Chrome’s association with the largest search engine, may herald the end of FireFox.  No other browser gives so much control to the user like Firefox does. Most users don’t understand that Firefox is more customizable than either Google Chrome or Internet Explorer.  If Mozilla doesn’t find a way to replace the lost revenue, then expert searchers may loose their most fundamental and productive tool.  That will lead to a forced change for this digital troglodyte expert searcher.

At a recent conference, Kevin Ripa told me that a registry entry would solve the problem after I mentioned that it didn’t search Google.  If you’re going to feel like an idiot, its good to shown-up by a really smart guy like Kevin.

Go to the registry key:

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Copernic\Agent\System]

and insert the following string:

EngineUpdateAddress=

with value, http://updates.copernic.com/k2upd/agentex

To switch on the verbatim search tool,  go to “2. More search tools” in the column on the left side of the screen.

Verbatim is not the same as the unary operator ‘+’.  In a unary operation, in a mathematical system, one element is used to yield a single result. Verbatim forces all terms to be searched “verbatim” not just one term. Verbatim searches also switch-off some of the standard corrections. Sometimes this hinders your search. According to SearchEngineLand, Verbatim searches without the following:

• making automatic spelling corrections
• personalizing your search by using information such as sites you’ve visited before
• including synonyms of your search terms (matching “car” when you search [automotive])
• finding results that match similar terms to those in your query (finding results related to “floral delivery” when you search [flower shops])
• searching for words with the same stem like “running” when you’ve typed [run]
• making some of your terms optional, like “circa” in [the scarecrow circa 1963]

If you want to conduct a search where one word is misspelled, but the other is correct, and you also want synonyms, stemming, etc., then you can’t use verbatim unless you put the required word in double quotes.  This will make searching for misspelled names (the “27 Mohammeds problem”) along with other search terms more difficult.

Verbatim may help limit the impact of “personalisation” that makes some searches difficult in Google, but the loss of functionality isn’t worth the gain in my opinion.

If as Google insists, it dropped the + operator because it wasn’t used, then I shall begin worrying about search operators such as intitle, allintitle, ~, *, – and other advanced search features that make Google my first choice.

An Investigator whats to know where an image comes from and how it may be associated with the web page he is currently scrutinising.  The Firefox Extension, Search by Image for Google 1.0.3, allows one to right click on an image to quickly find out the source of an image, how it is used, or find higher resolution versions via Google Reverse Image search.  (This works in Firfox V.7 but may not V.8)

Search by Image usually returns more instances of an image than Tineye, which is understandable give the number of images indexed by Google compared to Tineye.

If you use Yahoo for images searches, you’ll get results from http://www.flickr.com/, which generally has the high quality photos. Yahoo owns flickr, but Google will usually finds flickr images.

The astute Investigator will use both Tineye and Search by Image, along with other tools and search facilities.
 

Developing the necessary skills and knowledge isn’t ‘rocket science’.  It is ‘time in grade’.  You must simply do it, study how to do it, and network with people who do it.  Unfortunately, this process takes years of effort. I have been doing this type of research for nearly 20 years and I am still learning.

The Search Engine Problem

Google, Bing, Yahoo, and other search engines are owned by businesses.  The search engine is a cost to those businesses.  The search engine is what brings customers through the door.  Once the customer is through the door, the search engine business sells something like advertising and other services.  Understanding this is the first step to understanding that the search engine may not properly index what you want, or censor the material you seek.  For example, the so-called ‘Googlegate’, where Google censored pages with data on the ‘climategate scandal’.

Another example is that Google AdSense stopped serving ads to this blog because there are words in the blog to which they object.  It is a small step to intentionally not indexing something they don’t like or censoring something that represents a threat to corporate profits.

As an Investigator, there is no point to becoming upset with such problems.  Problems are there to be solved.

The Solution

If you are your own Expert Searcher, then you must recognise where the difficulties lie. This will mean developing search statements that yield the best results through trial and error. This will mean running many different search statements, for each topic searched, in many search engines.  In turn, this will create a problem in documenting the searches and collecting the results for later use.  The Expert Searcher will overcome these difficulties.

Over time, the Expert Searcher will develop a methodology for searching and documenting the process.  The Expert will develop a set of sources on the Internet and elsewhere to fulfill most of his or her needs.  From this will evolve a means of reporting that accurately states the sources and methods without the clutter of the large amount of data collected.

The Expert & The PI

You may not be the Expert Searcher, which is fine if know this to be the case.  You are a potential problem, if you think you are an Expert Searcher and you are not one.

If you use an Expert Searcher, and you should, you need to apply your skills to give him a solid starting point, especially when developing an Internet Profile.  The Expert Searcher requires the following:

1.   Name & Nicknames
2.   D0B
3.   Address(es)
4.   Telephone
5.   Fax
6.   Email address(es)
7.   Known internet handles
8.   Known hobbies
9.   Known employment
10. Known business & personal affiliations

I typically run the searches through specialised software for social networking and search engine sites, followed by some in-depth search engine queries, and then, I combine that with some whois searches and archived website reports.  This develops a fairly robust Internet profile.  Finally, I combine the Internet profile with authoritative public records and content from a variety of database aggregators.

What You Get

Your Search Expert will:

1.  Report Sources & Methods
2.  Properly cite sources
3.  Properly evaluate the source data based upon 13 criteria.
4.  Use a proven search methodology
5.  Properly document the search statements and search methodology
6.  Select the best sources.

When I first tested Askboth.com it only searched Bing and Google.  I didn’t like the Google ads that cluttered-up the page.  Now the ads are gone and Twitter appears in the centre column of the search results.

If you use NoScript, then select Temporarily Allow Askboth.com. This isn’t the only search engine that requires scripts.

Askboth.com is a very useful tool for comparing the ranking of a query on both engines at the same time.  This often aids in the creation of a more precise search statement when you go directly to the individual search engines and Twitter search tools.