Tools and tips round up: new Google image context tool in beta

Plus tools for searching emails, phones, and usernames

Google image context tool

For more than a decade, journalists and investigators asked Google to add the ability to sort reverse image search results by date. TinyEye does it, and it’s hugely helpful for verification. But it seemed like Google would never add this feature.

That changed in late June when Google announced the beta version of an image context tool for Fact Check Explorer. I got a live demo and it looks very promising! You can sign up here to get access to the beta, which should begin rolling out next week.

Here’s a look at some of the features.

The tool automatically extracts the date an image was first indexed by Google.

It groups image results by Date, Subject(s), and References. You see a timeline showing when the image was used in different contexts and the sources that used it. This is a much easier way to navigate image search results.

There’s also a menu where you can choose to highlight results by subject.

I’ll share more as the tool continues to evolve. You can also follow Mevan Babakar, Google’s News and Information Credibility Lead, for updates.

Tools and tips

📍 A very cool project has created an easy to use web interface for popular Python OSINT tools. Rather than have to install Python and the tools on your machine, you can use the site to check emails, usernames, and phone numbers. (Via @cyb_detective)

📍 Sticking with email and phone number search tools, this search tool from OSINT Industries is a great option to use in combination with whatsmyname.app and epios.com. So is is this tool, Defastra.

📍 Bellingcat also launched its own username search tool, Name Variant Search! It lets you “see possible variants of names used online to help streamline research into an individual.” It’s a nice accompaniment to the others.

📍 Trying to find emails associated with a particular search query? Enter keywords in omail.io and it will extract email addresses from Google and Bing search results. (Via Cyb_detective)

📍 IDCrawl.com is a free people search tool for US individuals. (Via @0xtechrock)

📍 How to find a LinkedIn account associated with a specific email. (Via Jake Creps)

📍 Jake Creps created a bookmarklet that will “extract emails and source domain from a page, save it as a CSV, and name the CSV the URL of the page.”

📍 Hive Index is a search engine for online communities. Useful for finding Telegram, Discord, and other public groups. (Via @cqcore)

📍 The fabulous InVID browser extension for photo and video verification recently got an upgrade.

📍 Wondering if threat actors created phishing domains to masquerade as an online service or property? Search the original domain or brand name etc. in DNSTwist.

📍 Hank Van Ess launched Google Reverse Image Search Fix, which bypasses Google Lens as the default option for an image search.

📍 Betaface is a new (to me at least) face search tool.

📍 A walkthrough of how to see the different usernames a Twitter (or X?) account may have had. (Via @cyb_detective)

📍 Map Switcher is Chrome extension that “lets you quickly view any location across a wide variety of mapping services. (Via @trcrtc)

📍 EmbedAI lets you upload web links, PDFs, and text documents and train a chatbot on them. You can ask the chatbot questions about the content to assist with analysis and summarization. (Be careful about what you upload!)

📍 You can use Google Bard to analyze an image, but the results may include errors.(Via @cyb_detective)

Worth Reading

📚 Henk Van Ess wrote a hugely useful five-part Open Source Research Guide for the Global Investigative Journalism Network. It covers search tools and techniques for LinkedIn, Telegram, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.

📚 Piotr Sapiezynski and Leon Yin wrote a great tutorial on web browser automation.

📚 Eva Prokofiev wrote an OSINT guide for digging into Chinese companies.

📚 Gabriel Geiger from Lighthouse Reports wrote a breakdown of how they investigated welfare fraud algorithms in Europe. They also published their methodology.

That’s it for this edition of Digital Investigations! Thanks for reading.