Explicit Words
It’s apparent that Google believes that its search algorithms are capable of determining the searcher’s intent. It is also obvious that Google filters out explicit image content, regardless of user...
View ArticleYouTube — Survival and Sanity Kit I
Watching YouTube videos is tiresome due to the ads around each video. The YouTube Options for Google Chrome browser extension hides the ads, annotations, disables autoplay, and hides the comments. It...
View ArticleYouTube — Survival and Sanity Kit II
The extension, Turn Off the Lights, darkens everything around the YouTube video. Clicking on the small lamp icon on the toolbar makes the surroundings go dark. This is for making screen clips of the...
View ArticleYouTube — Survival and Sanity Kit III
The Download YouTube Videos add-on for Firefox puts a download button underneath the YouTube video which allows downloading videos as MP4 and FLV formats while selecting the quality level at which to...
View ArticleSocial Search
Over the past few years, social search has become a big thing amongst Private Investigators. It feels like I have written about this for even longer. The way social sites have become part of how people...
View ArticleSocial Search — The Starting Point
On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog. Investigations often start without knowing the identity of the malefactor. Often it is an event that sparks the investigation. The aim of the investigation...
View ArticleSocial Search — Convoflow
Convoflow aggregates the traffic on social sites such as Blog Catalog, dailymotion Flickr, Friendfeed, Identi.ca, MetaCafe, Twitter, YouTube, and more. The results are displayed in groups — one group...
View ArticleSocial Search — The Event Horizon
Events create a lot of social media chatter. Within this chatter or noise, the Investigator must find useful data. If the origin of the investigation is an event at a particular location, then...
View ArticleSocial Search — 48ers.com
This site doesn’t offer anything special, but it works quite well. It doesn’t have a real-time refresh, which I like as it makes examination of the search results less hectic. The results are dominated...
View ArticleSocial Search — Delicious.com
Delicious is a social bookmarking site. Social bookmarking is storing and sharing the sites that the user finds interesting. This site has over 6 million users. That makes it a huge catalog of what...
View ArticleGoogle-Free Wednesday — Alerts
During the recent apparent demise of Google Alerts, I turned to using Talkwalker and Mention. I found Talkwalker to be better than the broken-down Google Alerts. Mention seemed interesting, but the Web...
View ArticleSocial Search — Namechk.com
Knowem is probably the most comprehensive search site for finding user names & screen names. NameChk is similar, but it doesn’t search as many sites (158). Be warned, this site doesn’t like...
View ArticleWhat’s on Your Wishlist?
The Boston Marathon incident is somewhat instructive from an Investigative Internet Research (IIR) perspective. News reporters are skilled at IIR — some to the exclusion of real journalistic skills if...
View ArticleSearching for Hacked Accounts
I always use the subject’s known email addresses as search terms. I assume that any good Investigator would do the same. However, where you search matters. Have you ever searched an email address and...
View ArticleCanadian Government Documents
The Canadian Government Documents Google Custom Search Engine covers over 775 core domains at the Federal, Provincial and Municipal levels of government. Unfortunately, the search engine was last...
View ArticleTim Horton’s & Investigative Internet Research
An article titled, Tim Hortons apologizes for blocking gay and lesbian news website by The Canadian Press on Friday, July 19, 2013 caught my attention. Tim Hortons is a popular Canadian coffee shop...
View ArticleGoogle Drops Synonym Search
Google eliminated the synonym search feature in June. If you wanted to search your search term and its synonyms, you placed the tilde sign (“~”) immediately in front of your search term. They said...
View ArticleICANN Wants to Close Whois
A working group for Internet regulators at ICANN wants to close all Whois databases. They what to force anybody needing this data to grovel before them before granting access. They are trying to...
View ArticleCarrot Search
I use clustering search engines to build the most specific search statement possible for use in the large search engines. Carrot Search is a clustering search engine that I have added to my stable of...
View ArticleHow to Get More Relevant Google Results
Did you know that you can improve your Google results by changing the order of the words in your search statement? Try searches for “civil society” or “society civil”, with and without double quotes....
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