Tools and tips round up: The decline of Google Search, investigating munitions, and more
Plus: How to build your own database, find Amazon Wishlists, investigate Telegram, and automate gathering info from company websites.
Professional searchers and investigators often complain about the quality of Google Search results.
The low quality content, the truncated results, the emphasis on guessing what a user wants and highlighting one answer, rather than inviting complex queries… Yes, power searchers have lots of complaints. But we don’t seem to be alone.
“A lot of folks are unhappy, in 2023, with their ability to find information on the internet, which, for almost everyone, means the quality of Google Search results,” read a recent article in The Verge. (Google’s search liaison really didn't like it!)
It went deep into the search engine optimization industry to see whether “a bunch of megalomaniacal jerks were degrading our collective sense of reality because they wanted to buy Lamborghinis and prove they could vanquish the almighty algorithm.” What does that look like? Check out the recent Twitter thread where a guy boasted about executing a “SEO heist” that used AI-generated content to “steal” millions of visitors from a competing website.
Search engine manipulation is big business. I previously dug into how unethical SEOs manipulate Google results using fake personas, dubious scholarship schemes, and hacked backlinks. The Markup also did a fantastic investigation that showed Google heavily promotes its own products on the search results page. (Read the excellent accompanying methodology article.)
Regardless of how you feel about Google Search’s performance, it’s remains essential and incredibly powerful. Dorking is a core skill for any investigator. We have no choice but to figure out how to extract info from Google. But we shouldn’t only rely on Google. What does this mean in practice?
offered some great advice in their recent article, “Google searches bad. What to do?”It boils down to this:
So the main advice is “Just because Google suddenly didn’t find something doesn’t mean it’s not exist. Try different search methods and tools”.
The piece runs through a variety of tips and tools for searching on Google and elsewhere.
Now for a rundown of other things I’ve come across over the past month.
Tools
📍 My colleagues at ProPublica rolled out a bunch of new features in Nonprofit Explorer. It’s a free tool you can use to investigate U.S. nonprofits and the people associated with them. For example, you can sign up to be notified when a nonprofit submits a new tax filing to the IRS!
📍 Airwars launched the Open Source Munitions Portal. It’s a fantastic resource for identifying and researching global munitions. Here’s a video guide to using it.
📍 @SEINT_pl created a really interesting looking name/nickname search tool. I’m excited to try it out.
📍 Predicta Search is a new email and phone number research tool. It has free and paid tiers.
📍 @the_wojciech announced a new version of a paid tool, Open Source Surveillance. I haven’t tested it but it says you can use it to “gather real-time intelligence from Social media, Cameras, Internet of Things or Crimes and Amber Alerts,” among other features.
📍 Bellingcat launched Wayback Google Analytics, a Python tool that “gathers current and historic Google analytics data (UA, GA and GTM codes) from a collection of website urls.” If you want to learn more about this method and about Google Analytics codes, see this previous post from me.
📍 Henk Van Ess launched a custom ChatGPT tool called Search Helper that “refines search queries with specific terms and includes Google links.” You need to be signed up for ChatGPT Plus to use it. And here’s Henk’s Substack.
📍 Here’s a Chrome extension that uses ChatGPT to summarize YouTube videos.
📍 @osintcombine shared a link to Disboard, a tool used to discover Discord servers. As they noted, “it’s an opt-in system, so not every discoverable server will appear in your search results.”
Worth Reading
📚
of Hunchly and Automating OSINT fame launched a new Substack called Bullshit Hunting. It has free and paid tiers.📚 Annique Mossou of Bellingcat gave a video workshop about how she used OSINT techniques to dig into her family history.
📚 Saad Sarraj posted a quick guide to finding a Wishlist registry on Amazon.
📚 CyberRaya wrote a guide to using GVision, “a reverse image search app that use Google Cloud Vision API to detect landmarks and web entities from images.”
📚
wrote “8 basic methods of automating the collection of information from company websites.”📚 Oxana Korzun wrote a guide to the “Best Online Tools for Telegram Investigations.” Combine it with the exhaustive list of tools and resources maintained by Ginger T.
📚
wrote “A brief and partial history of generative AI on social media.”📚 The Global Investigative Journalism Network hosted a workshop that offered “Expert Tips for Journalists on Building Your Own Datasets.” There’s a tip sheet and video.
📚 I’m going to starting and mixing in selections from academic research and writing. One free article to check out is “The Affective Epistemology of Digital Journalism: Emotions as Knowledge Among On-the-Ground and OSINT Media Practitioners Covering the Russo-Ukrainian War.”
📚 Another free article worth a look examined mass account flagging on TikTok and Instagram: “The assemblages of flagging and de-platforming against marginalised content creators.”
That’s it for this edition of Digital Investigations! Thanks for reading. You can find me on Threads, Bluesky, Mastodon, and LinkedIn. I’m not very active on Twitter these days.