Google search results are based on your web history and geographic origin. If you want to see how this can distort the search results you get, then do a Google search using your normal ISP connection, then do the same search using TOR, then again with Xerobank. Each search will return different results.
Google isn’t the only search engine where this happens.
A Firefox add-on called Greasemonkey allows you to customize the way a web page displays using small bits of JavaScript. With Greasemonkey, Twitter Search Results on Google adds real-time results from Twitter to the top of the Google search results screen—so you can see what people are talking about while researching a subject.
When you search for any term in Google, you will see the 5 most recent tweets matching your keywords above the search results.
Once you have installed Greasemonkey, got to Mark Carey’s userscript.org page and click in the install button on the top right corner of the page to add this functionality to you Google searches.
This is a very useful tool.
Wikipedia has become a source of information for millions, but it is not without its problems. Vandalism occurs, and many authors think they know much more about a topic than they truly do. Many authors have political or commercial agendas that they build into Wikipedia articles. As most of the authors are anonymous or pseudonymous, it is difficult to evaluate the content of an individual article.
If you use Wikipedia, may I suggest that you refer to How Wikipedia Works. Chapter 4 is titled, Understanding and Evaluating an Article. This is the most useful chapter for professional researchers. If you haven’t used Wikipedia much, may I also suggest reading Chapter 3, entitled Finding Wikipedia’s Content, which is about searching.
Go to the top of the article and click on the tab marked history for a list of the people who have changed the article. You can compare the changes to see what changed in each version of the article by using the radio buttons. You will often notice that certain “contributors” are really vandals and knaves.
Look at the History and Discussion tabs for the article on the Danish Muhammad cartoon controversy to see how these can be really important. You can quickly tell who not to trust from reading the discussion pages and looking at the history tab content on many articles. For example, look at the contributor RanEagle in the history tab and click on talk.
Mark Schaver writes on the Depth Reporting blog about a site, WikiScanner, that reveals organizations where employees have made anonymous edits of Wikipedia articles.
Every writer, reporter, and investigator should read the article entitled Checkpoint by award-winning author John McPhee in the Feb. 9-16, 2009 issue of New Yorker Magazine . The abstract is available, but you must be a subscriber to read the full article online. Of course, you could go to the library and read the article, or just buy the magazine.
An excellent post from the Sources & Methods blog on Wednesday, October 29, 2008:
GenderAnalyzer is a free site that seeks to automatically determine the sex of a particular blog’s author… UClassify, the company that sponsors the site, also has a free service called TypeAnalyzer which determines…a Myers Briggs Personality Type automatically…Since so much activity online is either functionally anonymous or deliberately deceptive, everyone from advertisers to law enforcement professionals to national security types are trying to figure out who is doing/watching what.
In December 2008, Google created a centralized profile system that will provide personalized information to all the Google products. These Google Profiles are minimalist things compared to LinkedIn and Facebook. However, they are accessible to search engines for indexing and may appear in search results. This may be Google’s first step into the social network arena as the Google Profiles launch came on the heels the Google Open Social product launch.
These profiles may be searched at the Google Profile search site. I was experimenting with this and found an enormous number of trashy profiles. One can search by name, but the fun starts when one searches by any rude or vulgar term that comes to mind. Of course, one could perform useful searches using company names or names of real people.
I used to do a series of lectures about the skills I found most lacking in the education of detectives. The lecture about evaluating the revealed wisdom that pours forth from the Internet was always fun to deliver.
One example that I used when I started doing these, was a site that identified the second gunman in the Kennedy assassination — there was Elvis holding a Thompson sub-machine gun on the grassy knoll. It was on the Internet so it must be true.
Here is the 13 point check list for evaluating information upon which I based the lecture. Continue reading ‘What They Don’t Teach in Detective School’
Secret Squirrel would be jealous of all the facilities available to the Virtual Investigator. These things let the Virtual Investigator ask questions and communicate without revealing his secret identity.
Setting-up your computer for TOR use, or XeroBank’s anonymous proxy server network, then getting an email address from www.hushmail.com or www.mail.com begins your transformation into a Virtual Investigator. Continue reading ‘The Virtual Investigator’
Thousands of people around the world use Onion Routing or TOR to do things on the Internet. Private Investigators should use it to maintain anonymity during investigations. Continue reading ‘The Anonymous Investigator’
During a recent research project, I wanted a picture of a commercial property in downtown San Francisco. It’s always good to take a look at the premises from which a business operates to avoid dealing with a phantom business.
I requested that our agent in San Francisco go there and take a picture. He said it would be less bother to get it from Google Street View. He does that all the time. As you can see on the map, (Google Street View) this isn’t offered for any Canadian city right now, and if the privacy fanatics have their way it never will. However, in San Francisco, this got me two excellent pictures of the building.
The street addresses served-up by Google are only approximations, so you have to move up and down the street looking for street numbers to get the correct building. To get the pictures into a report use print screen as the images themselves can’t be copied. Pressing print screen key in MSWindows will capture the entire screen, while pressing the alt key in combination with print screen will capture the currently selected window. Paste the image into the report using the ctl-V combination.
The Commonplace Book is a written scrapbook filled with things one learns, but doesn’t want to forget.
The name, commonplace, is a translation of the Latin term, locus communis, which means argument or theme for general application. The theme of my Commonplace Book is the concepts and facts that I have learned and the books I have read.
The Confidential Resource is a modern analog for a Commonplace Book with the theme of Sources & Methods for the Investigator.
…she sent me this article, When Is Social Networking Kosher In The Office? from NPR. You can read it or listen to it.
I had to share this one, because we hear companies discussing this all the time – the pros and cons of social networking. This story talks about Yammer as one workplace solution for team microblogging.
Yammer takes the basic idea behind Twitter and moves it into the workplace, where it is only accessible via SSL to employees with a valid company email (and other security restrictions).
Yammer might be a useful tool to manage projects and keep track of what teammates or employees are doing without exposing their “Tweets” to the whole world.
Please don’t consider these as New Year’s resolutions (I know what happens to those — I still haven’t lost that 10 lbs.). Do these out of consideration for your clients and suppliers.
Add a signature to your email. A “signature” is a block of text at the end of your emails that contain all your contact information. Your recipients don’t need the hassle of hunting for, or asking you for, your address and phone number.
Make sure that your website has a “Contact Us” section and ensure that it has your street address and telephone numbers.
Parkinson’s Law states that work expands to fill the time allotted.
Efficient online searching dictates that you set time limits for each search. If you don’t, the time allotted will be infinite and the job will expand to fill all the time you have and more.
The first step to preventing Parkinson’s Law from taking over your life is to fully understand what you are really looking for. As an Investigator, I will normally look for data on people or companies; each has a name, address, telephone number, and fax number. This is how I search for this data on the Internet and compile the results in the shortest possible time.
The purpose of the “Assembly Line” is to be certain that I search using all relevant search terms while keeping good records of the date and URL’s where I find things. The collected material will be well organised for easy report production. Hence the title, Assembly Line Searching. Continue reading ‘Assembly Line Searching’
I’m taking a new image search engine for a test drive. This thing takes a picture and compares it to images that it has indexed. Instead of indexing words, it indexes the picture by applying a sophisticated pattern recognition algorithm to each image and then it indexes the result. Given an image to search for, TinEye tells you where and how that image appears all over the web—even if it has been modified.
This tool has quite a few uses. If you find a picture of a subject, use TinEye to see where the picture might reappear. This can lead to more useful information about the subject. Any sites about the subject or owned by the subject get the same treatment if the site has images. I’m surprised what I sometimes find doing this.
The database is small in comparison to the vast number of images available on the Internet. However, I have found that this thing works very well.