This Twitter thing has become a necessity to the connected. It is also an evolving search problem for Investigators.
Searching Twitter isn’t as straightforward as I would like. Content disappears in a short time in many search facilities and search results differ depending on which search facility you use.
Here are 18 Twitter-related sites that I have found useful: Continue reading ‘Twitter Searching’
I found a new new site indexing UK company records based on a snapshot taken on 4th March 2010 which includes names of their directors but not their addresses. This is searchable by the person’s name.
we bought the Companies House appointment snapshot and dropped it into a quick little searchable symfony app so you can browse the data – it’s the directors and secretaries of every UK company, cross-linked.”
The tilde (~) helps you find synonyms of words in a Google search. This is usually done by preceding the term with a ~. For example, searching using the term ~investigator will yield results with synonyms for investigator. It is also an excellent search to do in Google RealTime when searching social media to ensure you are using the right search terms.
The tilde search is excellent for search term discovery and variance testing.
In the past I have written about hiding your tracks as you search the Internet and about the Google SSL search interface.
Now let me introduce you to the SSL version of Scroogle. Like the SSL Google, it hides your search terms from IP logging. No one snooping between your browser and Scroogle can figure out what you were looking for, because the information is encrypted. Unlike the SSL version of Google, your IP address is dropped before your search terms are sent to Google. Therefore, Google has no idea who is conducting the search.
When you click on any of the links in the Scroogle results on the secure results page, SSL does not allow the browser to record the address of where that secure page came from, and attach it to any outgoing non-SSL links on that page. Using SSL blanks-out this referrer, so that any non-SSL site you click on from a Scroogle SSL page won’t even know that you arrived at their site from Scroogle or anywhere else.
In practice, Scroogle isn’t the greatest for finding video and clicking on a link does not open a new window in Firefox. This makes it somewhat awkward when doing high-volume searching, but it offers excellent security.
Open the Search settings at the top right of the Google Search page. This brings you to the Preferences Page. In the Number of Results section select 100. Next go to the last section for Google Instant, select the second option, “Do not use Google Instant“.
By disabling Instant, the full 100 search results should appear.
This tool rules out some choices for vacation locales: Murder Captured By Google Street View Car
The following two articles are required reading for anyone who must search by company or product name.
Furthermore, the Official Google Blog post titled Showing More Results from a Domain, indicates that their algorithm is intended to show searchers more results from a single domain where evidence exits that there is a “strong user interest in a particular domain.” They also note that the last few results (on a search results page set to show 10 results) are from other domains to preserve diversity in the results.
This has serious implications for anybody doing due diligence research as many derogatory entries in the search engine database will not appear without additional search terms. It also means that search results set to 10, 20, 30, 50, and 100 per page may give radically different proportions of search results when sorted by domain.
Google introduced encrypted search which gives the user the option to use SSL (Secure Socket Layer) to prevent packet sniffing which in turn could reveal user’s searches on the site. The encrypted search service moved to https://encrypted.google.com.
Only Google web search is available over SSL. Other search products like Google Images and Google Maps are not currently available over SSL.
“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.
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.
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.
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.