Archive for the 'Search Strategies' Category

Surfing Is Not Searching

Published
by
Richard McEachin
on August 20, 2008
in Methods, Search Strategies and Sources
. 0 Comments

Google and Yahoo! have fostered the belief that if you can type, then you are a researcher. In my experience, the DIY researcher’s greatest failings occur in the following areas:

  • poor source selection
  • not understanding that a hierarchy of authorities may exist for the research topic
  • not understanding the relationship between time, money, and value
  • not understanding how error and bias may appear in search results; and finally, terminology.

Most DIY searchers do not prepare for the search by collecting the synonyms and antonyms, thesauri, dictionaries, and the British and American spelling differences. They don’t take time to consider appropriate terms and phrases then make a list to work through.

Social Network Mappers- Part II

Published
by
Richard McEachin
on July 30, 2008
in Search Strategies
. 0 Comments

Chris Pierre of Evince Services Inc. in Ottawa told me about a site called loco citato that has links to several good Social Network Mapping tools.

Corporate Filing Searches on the British Islands

Published
by
Richard McEachin
on July 25, 2008
in Company Research, Competitive Intelligence, Due Diligence, Private Investigator and Search Strategies
. 0 Comments

Competitive Intelligence, Investigations, & Due Diligence

Starting a competitive intelligence research project, an investigation, or due diligence research usually entails a detailed look at the corporate filings, share structure, and accounts of the target or subject company.

Great Britain

On the island of Great Britain, there are two separate registries, one for England and Wales, and another for Scotland. Both of these are operated by Companies House. The accounts and filings for England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland take the same format.

Ireland

On the island of Ireland, the Northern Ireland Department of Enterprise, Trade and Investment of the Northern Ireland Government, (DETINI) houses the corporate filings and accounts. Corporate filings in the Republic of Ireland may be obtained online from the Companies Registration Office.

Channel Islands

On the Channel Islands of Jersey and Guernsey the corporate filings are handled at the Jersey Financial Services Commission and the Guernsey Registry.  Jersey and Guernsey are tax havens, and companies incorporated there do not normally file accounts.

Isle of Man

The Isle of Man is a tax haven, and companies incorporated there do not normally file accounts. The Companies Registry holds corporate filings, and is part of the Financial Supervision Commission. Continue reading ‘Corporate Filing Searches on the British Islands’

Ruthless Numerical Evaluation of Web Data Sources

Published
by
Richard McEachin
on July 15, 2008
in Competitive Intelligence and Search Strategies
. 0 Comments

As I surf,  Alexa Sparky provides each site’s traffic rank and a historical chart of traffic in the bottom right-hand corner. This is useful for evaluating the reliability of the data on the site. This tool helps evaluate sources without being influenced by elaborate Web site designs.

Of course Alexa Sparky is far from perfect, it does not provide a full ranking, but it can help you identify better content. For instance, a site that is ranked in the mid-six-figure range has a large following. A site like Danger Room with a mid-three-figure ranking has an enormous following, larger that many newspapers and newsstand magazines.

Finding Inbound Links

Published
by
Richard McEachin
on July 14, 2008
in Search Engines and Search Strategies
. 1 Comment

Evaluating a web site or blog is never easy. Fact checking will weed out the crap, but who needs to start with a lot of crap. The number of links to a site will supposedly put it towards the top of the search results, but that isn’t a guarantee of accuracy if the inbound links are from sites full of crap.

When I see something worth citing, I begin the evaluation by seeing who links to the site, perhaps it will be other sites already proven reliable through fact checking. This may also lead you to more or better data.

Continue reading ‘Finding Inbound Links’

Finding Employees with Google

Published
by
Richard McEachin
on June 25, 2008
in Competitive Intelligence and Search Strategies
. 0 Comments

If you need to interview current or former employees of a company for competitive intelligence or investigative purposes, then Google is the first resource to consult.

This simple search will help you find employees of a given company:

Acme Company “employed by” OR “work for”

This might be tedious to sort through the results as ” work for” may turn up a lot of irrelevant hits. Try this with IBM as the company name and you will see what I mean.

To find references to a person’s employment try this:

“john smith” “employed by” OR “work for”

With either of these searches you might want to add a country, province, or city to limit the number of hits returned.

Researching University Students

Published
by
Richard McEachin
on June 23, 2008
in Search Strategies
. 0 Comments

Tamara Thompson’s excellent article on gathering information about university students in the USA illustrates how a real researcher goes about doing what some call a Deep Web Search.

The last link in the article shows how to find student directories at US and Australian universities. In Canada, a Google search for intitle:student inurl:directory site:ca seems to work best.

GooFresh

Published
by
Richard McEachin
on June 12, 2008
in Search Engines and Search Strategies
. 0 Comments

GooFresh

Google offers a date-based syntax, but you can only access it via the advanced search, which limits your time options, or the date range: syntax, which uses Julian dates and is a bit difficult to use.

Goofresh is a way to search for sites added today, yesterday, within the last seven days, or last 30 days.

Crisis Planning at Yahoo!

Published
by
Richard McEachin
on June 11, 2008
in Search Engines and Search Strategies
. 0 Comments

If you enclose your search terms in square brackets, then Yahoo! will only retrieve pages that have your search terms in that order. The search terms may be anywhere on the page, but the first term will appear before the second and the second before the third, etc..

An example would be [crisis planning]. It returns a document that is entitled Planning for a Crisis. It might seem backward but at the end of the quotation near the top of the page you find “Crisis Management:Planning for the Inevitable (1986)“.

Unsecured Web Cam Search

Published
by
Richard McEachin
on June 10, 2008
in Search Engines and Search Strategies
. 0 Comments

This Google search should find any unsecured web cams: inurl:”ViewerFrame?Mode=”.

However, you can take this further by adding the site: operator. You could even set-up a Custom Google Search Engine for a group of domains.

Finding Corporate Owned Internet Domains

Published
by
Richard McEachin
on June 6, 2008
in Company Research, Competitive Intelligence, Search Engines, Search Strategies and Sources
. 0 Comments

I was recently asked how to find the domains owned by a particular company. Here is what I recently unearthed on this topic.

Whois

You can still search RIPE (Regional Internet Registry for Europe), which contains registrations for most of the European countries. The US server at InterNic no longer allows this.

Databases

Domain Names database on Dialog includes information on registered domain names with Top Level Domains (TLD) of COM, NET, ORG, BIZ, and INFO as well as those that use country codes, e.g., AT. it can be searched by owner name. This database was last updated in September 2004.

DomainTools offers a rather expensive solution which is like an updated version of the Domain Names database. According to their web site:

…currently indexes all domains in the .COM, .NET, .ORG, .INFO, .BIZ, and .US TLDs. That is 103,042,578 domains as of today. In addition to indexing every active domain, it also knows about the 334,835,604 inactive domains that have been registered and deleted since the early days of the Internet. Great names are deleted daily so it is important that we keep track of them.

The partial word searching ability of Name Intelligence is unmatched by any other engine. We allow more options and faster results then anything else on the market and we continue to add new functionality monthly. In an information world a company can only focus on so many problems at one time. We dedicate our time to making domain searching faster and more efficient so our partners can dedicate their time to their own core technologies.

Every month Name Intelligence actively probes every domain name in its search engine to figure out the domain’s status. Our search results not only reflect active and deleted domains but domains with websites or not. We have taken searching for domains very seriously.

… DomainTools has leveraged the power of its Registrant Search engine to provide notifications whenever a person or company registers a new domain, has one transfered to them, or transfers a domain out of their control.

They report on two Richard McEachin names for $57. When I search on Scarborough, the city for the registrant address, it finds two records for one domain for $57. When I add Canada as a limiter, they says they have no reports.

Searching the name McEachin returned 248 records in 147 domains and a report cost of $147. When I add Canada as a limiter, they again say they have no reports. When I search on Scarborough, the city for the registrant address, it finds four records for one domain for $61.

Not exactly what I call a stellar performance.

Proxy Registrations

Many domain registrants are now are concealed by registrars such as Domains by Proxy.

Security Scanner or Research Tool

Published
by
Richard McEachin
on June 4, 2008
in Search Engines, Search Strategies and Security
. 0 Comments

FoundStone (a division of McAffee) recently released a free tool called SiteDigger. The tool uses the Google API to scan cached pages of a web site and then performs security checks on those cached pages. One of the things it will look for is open security webcams.

Custom Google Search Engine

Published
by
Richard McEachin
on May 21, 2008
in Search Engines and Search Strategies
. 0 Comments

Have you ever wondered how you could run the same search against a list of websites? Typically, the search would be something like search_statement site:your_list_of_sites.com. Google has the answer to this problem. (See our article about this search operator.)

Google Custom Search Engine may be set-up to search one website or multiple websites with one search string. Of course you need a Google Account to create the custom search.

Uncovering a Person’s Corporate Affiliations

Published
by
Richard McEachin
on April 30, 2008
in Canada, Company Research, Competitive Intelligence, Methods, Private Investigator and Search Strategies
. 2 Comments

In Canada, only one incorporating jurisdiction allows a search by officer or director name. Uncovering a person’s corporate affiliations in Canada is difficult.

The Investigator must embark upon an involved search strategy using a variety of database aggregators, the Internet, and a few public record sources. After conducting all these searches, the Investigator will never be certain that he has found everything.

Doing this type of research is dependent upon the Investigator’s understanding of the sources’ content and how to connect the data to the objectives of the investigation.

The Investigator must know how to search directory databases, commercial credit reports, news and journal databases, insider filings, statistical data, court records, lien filings, and much more to reveal corporate affiliations in Canada.

Confidential and Not for Distribution

Published
by
Richard McEachin
on April 28, 2008
in Company Research, Competitive Intelligence, Private Investigator, Search Engines and Search Strategies
. 2 Comments

You just had to ask how I found it. Now look, you may be the client but it’s a secret — their secret that is.

Do a Google search for “not for distribution” confidential and look at all the stuff you find. Now try “not for distribution” confidential site:microsoft.com and look at what you find. Now if you were to try this on the subject company’s web site….

Web-based documents are neither confidential nor private, but they might be a secrets in plain sight.

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