In her "Online Sources of Information" webinar (March 2011), PI Cynthia Navarro listed her favorite resources for finding information about companies and individuals.
Cloud Frontiers: A Deep Dive into Serverless Spatial Data and FME
Online sources of information december 2010
1. Some Places to Check Out!
General
• Google.com
• Bing.com
• Blogsearchengine.com
• Inc.com
• Guidestar.com
• Nozasearch.com - (previously Grantsmart.com)
• Jigsaw.com
• Alltheweb.com
• Search.org
• Crimeanalysts.com
• Zoominfo.com
• State public data bases
• Archive.org - (check what a website looked like back to 1996)
• Technorati.com - (blog search engine)
• Secinfo.com - (info on publicly held companies)
• Crunchbase.com
• Wikipedia.org
• Craigslist - (auction and personals)
• Ebay.com - (auction site, great for locating items or to id someone selling)
• Zabasearch.com - (residential listings and more)
• Pipl.com - (this is great even if you think you have checked everything)
Business Search Engines
• Numberway.com (international white and yellow pages)
• Search.bbb.org (Better Business Bureau)
• Allbusiness.com
• Trendwatching.com (consumer trends firm)
• Jayde.com (B2B search engine)
• PCworld.directorym.com
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December 2010
Finnegan’s Way – 22568 Mission Blvd #144, Hayward CA 94541
Office 510-886-5150 Cell: 510-909-4327
Cynthia@finnegans-way.com
2. • Where2go.com (business directories worldwide)
• Kompass.com (B2B search engine)
Search Engines US
• Google.com
• Yahoo.com
• Lygo.com
• MSN.com
• Bing.com
• Dogpile.com
• About.com
• Kartoo.com (retrieves with text and pic of webpage/thumbnails)
• Altavista.com
• Alltheweb.com
• Mamm.com (meta search engine)
• A9.com (searches from e-commerce sites)
• Quinturq.com (provides additional words to use and refine search for
relevant information)
• Clipblast.com (worlds largest video search)
• like.com (search and shop visually)
• topix.com (check out what is going on by specific area)
• Yippy.com (they don’t track your activities! Played around with it and found
something that google didn’t! )
• Zabasearch.com
• ZoomInfo.com
International Search Engines
• Sympatico.com (CANADA)
• Yahoo.com (ADVANCED-102 COUNTRIES)
• Sensis.com.au (AUSTRALIA DON’T FORGET THE .AU)
• Ansearch.com (AUSTRALIA)
• ch.altavista.com (SWITZERLAND plus other countries)
• Suche.freenet.de (GERMANY)
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December 2010
Finnegan’s Way – 22568 Mission Blvd #144, Hayward CA 94541
Office 510-886-5150 Cell: 510-909-4327
Cynthia@finnegans-way.com
3. • arianna.libero.it (ITALY)
More International stuff
• Made-in-China.com- (connect with manufactures)
• Corporateinformation.com – (Company analysis‘ paid service)
• Thepaperboy.com - (international and national papers)
• Kidon.com- (links to global newspapers)
• Asianproducts.com – (find manufactures and businesses)
• Fita.org – (import/export trade leads)
• Alibaba.com (by country/region products, suppliers and buyers)
Personal Social Networking Communities
• Facebook.com
• MySpace.com
• Hi5.com (India, Brazil )
• Friendster.com
• Flickr.com (find that photo)
• Imeem.com (share your favorite music with others)
• Friendwise.com
• Downelink.com
• YouTube.com
• Xanga.com
• mocospace.com (similar to myspace)
• Bebo.com
• Wadja.com (social and mobile real-time content network)
Business Social Networking Communties
• Linkedin.com
• Spoke.com
• Zoominfo.com
• Plaxo.com
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December 2010
Finnegan’s Way – 22568 Mission Blvd #144, Hayward CA 94541
Office 510-886-5150 Cell: 510-909-4327
Cynthia@finnegans-way.com
4. • Ryze.com
• MySpace.com
• Fastpitchnetworking.com
• Twitter.com ((follow business/individuals)
• FohBoh.com
• Xing.com
• Jigsaw.com
• TopLinked.com
• Anywho.com (this includes reverse lookup)
• Yelp.com
People Search
• Switchboard.com
• Whowhere.com
• Infobel.com/teldir (covers 216 countries)
• DexOnline.com (includes government phone listings)
•
Blog sites
• Blogger
• Livejournal
• Skyblogs
• Technorati
• Deadjournal
• Greatestjournal
• Typepad
Social Networking Tools
• Thebrain.com (mapping your cases out)
• Kurrently.com (search facebook and twitter posts)
• Youropenbook.org (search Facebook updates for fun search: boss moron)
• Tweetdeck (love this!!!!)
• Crunchbase.com (free database of tech companies, people and investors)
4
December 2010
Finnegan’s Way – 22568 Mission Blvd #144, Hayward CA 94541
Office 510-886-5150 Cell: 510-909-4327
Cynthia@finnegans-way.com
5. Some random sites
• cluuz.com (search engine with visual display)
• expatfinder.com (foreign country skip tracing)
• geobytes.com/FreeServices.htm (geolocation and IP tracing)
• theinmatelocator.com/Home_Page.html (National inmate locator)
• lococitato.com (MySpace and Web 2.0 search tools)
• melissadata.com/lookups/index.htm (USPS address verification and
other tools, but not everything is for free)
• Pandora.com (internet radio)
• Parkopedia.com (find parking worldwide)
• Thefreelibrary.com
• Browsys.com (Thanks Dave Toddington; organize web pages in virtual
folders that can be created, accessed, edited and shared)
• Dotsub.com (videos that can be translated and put in multiple language
subtitles for videos across all platforms)
Mobile social friendly sites
• mySpace
• facebook
• linkedin
• sociallight
• tweetgeek
• flickr
• groovr
• mocospace
• placestodo
• loopt
• loopt.com/mix
• Yelp
• Dodgeball
• Twitter
5
December 2010
Finnegan’s Way – 22568 Mission Blvd #144, Hayward CA 94541
Office 510-886-5150 Cell: 510-909-4327
Cynthia@finnegans-way.com
6. •
Online Dictionaries
• http://www.riceplate.com/rap/rap.php (Bay Area Hip Hop Dictionary)
• http://www.urbandictionary.com
Don’t forget
• Change your Google search preferences for number of Results for the
page from the standard “10” to “100”
• When searching use the Math commands +(add), - (exclude), * (wildcard-
fill in the blank)
• Use terms like AND, OR, NOT, NEAR/2 (depending on the site)
• Use other names/spellings like Robert, Rob, Bob, Bobby
• Add to your search string things like, profession, sports, spouses name,
kids name, - “Cynthia Navarro” +soccer or “Cynthia Navarro” investigator
• Look for images while you’re at it
• Google is great for searching those “private” social networking sites. You
may come up with a previous “public” posting or something listed under
their friends profile
• Don’t forget to capture your findings; they may not be there later!
• When searching, check out Videos and News
• If you have an address, use Maps as well
•
Tools for Capturing
Acrobat – don’t forget this is not perfect, watch your margins (may need to
use landscape), it does not pick up multi layers, it is not only great for
page captures, but capturing an entire website, www.adobe.com
Snagit 8 – great for capturing a region, window, full screen, webpage and
webpage keeping links plus more - www.techsmith.com
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December 2010
Finnegan’s Way – 22568 Mission Blvd #144, Hayward CA 94541
Office 510-886-5150 Cell: 510-909-4327
Cynthia@finnegans-way.com
7. Camtasia Studio – great for capturing video- www.techsmith.com
WebCase – new product that shows to be very exciting for the online
investigator (corp edition and law enforcement edition). Check out their
website for additional information - www.veresoftware.com
Check out these Books
Business Background Investigations by Cynthia Hetherington
Online Competitive Intelligence by Helen P Burwell
The Manual to Online Public Records by Sankey & Hetherington
www.PIstore.com check out by category for you interest
Subscription Databases
Cpclear.com (Cynthia Hetherington’s new find, next generation online source)
IQdata.com
Tracers.com
Factivia.com (articles, great service)
irbsearch.com (my favorite)
knowx.com (subscription database owned by ChoicePoint)
lexisnexis.com(subscription database public records and legal research)
locateplus.com
masterfiles.com
merlindata.com
PACER.PSC.USCOURTS.GOV/(subscription database – Federal court records)
*things to remember, always use more than one database to verify and check to
see how current the information is you are getting
**we are just listing a few sites to check out…there are many that are not listed
***have fun and learn what you can, this is the future
7
December 2010
Finnegan’s Way – 22568 Mission Blvd #144, Hayward CA 94541
Office 510-886-5150 Cell: 510-909-4327
Cynthia@finnegans-way.com