Firefox Addon — Search Site v.3.2

Published on January 21, 2013 in Methods, Power User Tips and Search Strategies. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

Search Site 3.2 allows you to search within the current site from the search bar, or from the context menu, or by drag-and-drop into the search bar. This makes it easy to do a website-specific search, using the search engine currently selected in the search bar, if the site doesn’t have its own search box. If you use the search bar, type the search terms into the search bar and then click on the Search Site icon that appears in the search box or press Ctrl+Enter.

Searching the current site can also be done by using the right-click (context) menu. Just select the word or words you want to search and select Search Site for selection in the context menu. Unfortunately, the search results do not automatically open in a new tab, you must hold down the ctrl key as you select the Search Site for selection context menu item. Using the ctrl key will move the results to the foreground tab or if using the search bar,  hold down Ctrl  when clicking on the Search Site icon to display the results in new foreground tab.

I also recommend selecting Enclose the selected text in quotes when searching from context menu in the Options Dialog.

Firefox Addon — Google site: Tool

Published on January 18, 2013 in Methods, Power User Tips, Private Investigator, Search Engines and Search Strategies. 1 Comment Tags: , , .

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

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.

Greasemonkey

A Firefox add-on called  Greasemonkey allows you to customize the way a web page displays using small bits of JavaScript.

What CPIC Doesn’t Report

Published on January 16, 2013 in Canada, Courts and Public Records. 0 Comments

The Canadian Police Information Centre (CPIC) was created in 1966 as an information system for Canadian law enforcement agencies. It is the sole nationwide repository of criminal convictions in Canada. Many employers require a search of CPIC before hiring.

When a search is conducted for employment, you must understand what it doesn’t report.

A Canadian Police Criminal Record Check WILL NOT include:

  • Outstanding entries, such as charges and warrants, judicial orders, Peace Bonds, Probation and Prohibition Orders.
  • Absolute and Conditional Discharges.
  • Convictions where a pardon has been granted.
  • Convictions under provincial statutes.
  • Local Police contacts.
  • Ministry of Transportation information.
  • Family Court Restraining Orders.
  • Foreign information.
  • Charged and processed by other means such as Diversion.
  • Any reference to incidents involving mental health contact that did not result in a conviction.
  • Any information under the Youth Criminal Justice Act (YCJA ).

Web Citations

Published on January 11, 2013 in Methods, Private Investigator, Report Writing and Sources. 0 Comments Tags: .

While doing Investigative Internet Research (IIR), you find a document from an organisation that  changes its name before you finish your report. The document was retrieved before the name change. How do you cite reference? Do you cite it with the old organisation name or the new name?

Normal practice is to use the name as it was when you found the document. However, this can cause problems when someone does fact-checking to independently verify the citation. Someone must then find and document the history of the organisation name.

The solution is to cite the date the document was retrieved and in square brackets include the new name. For example, [currently, XTS Organisation] or better still [as of 11 Jan 13 the name changed to, XTS Organisation]. The latter addition to the citation creates a dated history of the organisation’s name.

California Business Entity Filing Improvement

Published on January 8, 2013 in Company Research, Public Records and U.S.A.. 0 Comments

Starting on 1 January 2013, the California Secretary of State (CA SOS) implemented changes to entity and agent address information required in business entity filings. The CA SOS memorandum is online here.

Boounce

Published on December 21, 2012 in Methods, Power User Tips, Private Investigator, Search Engines and Search Strategies. 0 Comments Tags: .

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/

Search Engine Filtering

Published on December 17, 2012 in Methods and Search Engines. 0 Comments

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.

Risk Assessment Adventure

Published on December 12, 2012 in Business Continuity, Risk Management, Security and Survival. 0 Comments

Once you acquire good research skills, you can apply those skills to support many endeavors. Recently, I have been doing risk assessment matrices for Business Continuity and Emergency Response planning.

One such job involved identifying the risks to a Business Continuity site. This site was in a rural area outside a large city. I collected the usual maps, aerial imagery, and satellite imagery of the site. This revealed a zoo was nearby. This led to the examination of a risk that few would normally consider — wild animals.

While the predatory carnivores such as lions and tigers seemed to be the greatest risk, we also learned that the large non-carnivores owned by zoos and feral livestock can be very destructive, especially to the fencing intended to keep out the carnivores.

You might not think this would be a risk, but just think of why a Business Continuity site might be in full operation and the risk become obvious. It would be operating due to a black swan event and that would probably entail the failure of normal utilities and services. Many of these animals would eventually escape due to broken fencing or be released to fend for themselves. The prospect of a number of large cats or grizzly bears loose near the site sparked a search for some very strong fencing.

This led us to examine which animals would be the most dangerous over a two year period. The most dangerous animals soon after a catastrophe would be feral dog packs followed by any domesticated pigs let loose and feral hogs. Neither of these animals are afraid of people and in a major disaster they might resort to feeding on corpses which would make a living person also look like a good meal. Hogs and pigs also represented the biggest risk to the fencing.

After the dogs and hogs, the greatest risk seemed to be Grizzly Bears. These animals are dangerous predators that are not afraid of man and they are adapted to the North American climate. The next was the lions and tigers. Next came the lesser cats and canids if they escaped from the zoo. In the two year span none of these zoo animals seemed to present a great risk if recent history in war zones is any guide.

Along with the dogs and hogs, it seemed that vermin such as rats and mice would be the constant threats, not the exotic creatures from the zoo.

Google’s Secret Proximity Operator

Published on December 10, 2012 in Search Engines and Search Strategies. 0 Comments Tags: .

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.

The Dangers of a Bad Pretext

Published on December 7, 2012 in Communication, Dirty Tricks, Ethics, Fraud, Methods, News and Private Investigator. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

The Daily Mail newspaper in the UK reports that the receptionist who was subjected to a pretext call by two Australian DJs may have committed suicide.

In the call at 5.30am on Tuesday impersonating the Queen, Miss Greig said: ‘Oh, hello there. Could I please speak to Kate please, my granddaughter?’

Thinking she was speaking to the Queen, the receptionist replied: ‘Oh yes, just hold on ma’am’.

She then put the presenters through to one of the nurses who was caring for the Duchess.

The nurse also believed she was speaking to the Queen and went on to make a number of deeply personal observations about Kate’s health.

This prank/pretext was bragged about by the two Australian DJs. This no doubt subjected the receptionist to a lot of ridicule.

The Australian DJs violated two of the three rules for doing pretext calls.

The three rules:

  1. Do not personate a living person.
  2. Do not personate a representative of any existing company (or business) or anything to do with government.
  3. Do not cause anybody to be concerned for their own safety or the wellbeing of any person, business, company, or property.

Snap Bird

Published on December 7, 2012 in Search Engines, Social Sites and Twitter. 0 Comments Tags: , .

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.

 

Topsy

Published on December 5, 2012 in Search Engines, Social Sites and Twitter. 0 Comments Tags: , .

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.

Omgili

Published on December 3, 2012 in Search Engines and Social Sites. 0 Comments

What the hell is Omgili?

After a bit of work I discovered that it stands for OhMyGogIloveIt. How cute is that?

Omgili is a vertical search engine that seems to search forums, and similar discussion sites.  It supposedly allows searching with phrases, Boolean search terms (OR, AND, NOT), wildcards, and time-frame filtering. If somebody out there knows what the wildcard symbol is, then please let me know.

The people who run this thing exhibit an interesting marketing strategy. The main search page doesn’t tell the user much about what it really searches or how to use it. I’m not sure that this cunning strategy will lead to success.

After some trial and error, I found this to work well enough to add it to my “assembly line” of search engines.

UK Company and Director Information

Published on November 28, 2012 in Company Research, Public Records, Search Engines, Sources and United Kingdom. 0 Comments

Company Check Ltd. has “compiled records of over 5 million company directors (in its Director Check database), every company they are part of and the financials behind them, allowing you to see background information and other interests of company directors in the UK. Information about Directors includes Full Name, Date of Birth and Registered Address.”

They also operate the Company Check site where company registration details, key financials and director records, are currently available at no charge. Paid subscribers can also access current and historical credit scores and limits, county court judgments, detrimental data and more.

To search directors and officers go to:
http://company-director-check.co.uk/
To search companies go to:
http://companycheck.co.uk/

These are not replacements for searches of the authoritative source, Companies House, but they are useful for initial searches.

The descriptions of the two sites raise some questions about content if both represent the same official data source. As you can see above, Director Check says it has records for 5 million directors. However, the Company Check site gives the following stats: “12,000,000 directors listed with 10 million service addresses… 8,000,000 companies stored in our database.” I guess they are saying that they only made 5 million directors searchable in the Director Check database.

The Power of Dickie

Published on November 26, 2012 in Private Investigator and Surveillance. 0 Comments

Most Private Investigators learn that carrying a clipboard will grant access to most places, even those with confidential data to protect. Well there is a more powerful access tool than a clipboard and his name is Dickie.

Dickie doesn’t work alone, he has friends — 2-way radio, tool belt, Maglight, hard hat, and well-worn safety boots.

Nobody ever challenges Dickie. If a particularly diligent person does question Dickie, he says, “fine with me, but it will be at least four weeks until I can get back here. We’re really backed up.” Thusly, Dickie intimidates the most diligent, pretentious, and over-dressed staff member.

Dickie has an entire wardrobe to cover all occasions. Telephone technician days he is blue as Bell detested Gray.  On computer service days, he is in tan slacks with a white polo shirt. When he is fixing the troublesome copier, he is either blue or grey. On clean-up days, he helps the janitor in grey. On hot or cold days, he fixes the HVAC system in this blue-green ensemble.  Sometimes he delivers parcels in his fetching brown outfit.

Dickie is a master of surveillance and disguise.