Archive for the ‘Conferences’ Category

I spend much of each work day developing profiles of people and companies through Internet research. Private investigators aren’t usually just looking for a specific piece of information but everything that is in the public sphere. In this case, on the Internet. One of the means of getting access to the chaotic collection of information is search engines. Intelligent use of search engines can make the difference between a key discovery and merely being buried by too many irrelevant search results. A recent study (lower right corner of Web page) reiterates previous ones that reveal the slight overlap of search results between the different search engines. Here are some of the findings:

* On average, 69.6 percent of Google first page search results were unique to Google.
* On average, 79.4 percent of Yahoo! first page search results were unique to Yahoo!
* On average, 80.1 percent of Live first page search results were unique to Live.
* On average, 75.0 percent Ask first page search results were unique to Ask. [Reported in SearchEngineLand via Internet News ]

Those are the top 4 search engines. I have about 30 search engines – crawling the general Internet, social networking sites, blogs and group chat activity – that I use regularly for just about every research project. In my experience, I almost always find unique and valuable information through this expansive approach.

Learn more about advanced search queries in this slideshow. And closely clutch this guide.

Applying advanced search queries and “out-of-the-box” approaches to social networking sites isn’t helpful for just uncovering youth sites but also professional ones. Most business professionals are now using social networking sites to make connections. If you’re in California this September come to the presentation Carole Levitt and I will be doing on this topic at the State Bar of California Annual Meeting.

Anytime of the year is a good time to be in San Francisco. April is really lovely. An added bonus, if you’re a criminal defense investigator, lawyer, mental health expert, jury consultant, journalist or anyone else concerned with the rights of the criminally accused, is The Return of the Maltese Falcon: Training for Sam Spade in the 21st Century, the National Defense Investigators Association conference, April 26-28, 2006.

For the price of one elegant dinner on the town you can attend this two day intensive of presentations by those who have honed their craft. Hear notables David Fechheimer speaking on International Investigation: How Do We Investigate in the Global Village and the former Director of the San Francisco Office of Citizen Complaints addressing Dirty Cop Investigations: Examining Police (Mis)Conduct. Other topical sessions explore wiretapping, gang and child pornography investigations.