If you subscribe to PI buzz Alert you may have seen the link I included to UCrime, a crime information mapping site of recent crime incidents at universities. Search by address or date (2008 only) to see reported crimes plotted on a map, with icons distinguishing the type of incident. No names are listed and it’s not clear what the source is for the data, but this may still be useful if you need a snapshot of the criminal activity on any one of about 100 schools.

A site that may be an sister site, SpotCrime provides the same type of interactive mapping for cities and counties.

There are also crime logs and mapping of crimes at the Web sites of universities, university public safety departments and newspapers. The Morehead State University Police Web site has logs of incidents to 2004. This Texas college newspaper has put together a map of campus crimes, while this major daily paper only shows crimes perpetrated in the surrounding community in which students of the University at Albany were involved. A site calling itself UMichCrime gets data from the University of Michigan Department of Public Safety then plots it on a map. Most of the data on these sites are not retained for more than a few years; the Case Western Reserve crime mapping is an exception, extending to 2000. The Boulder Police Department at the University of Colorado plots recent crime incidents on an interactive map.

Find more campus crime maps searching for the words or phrases in the URL: crimemap, map or crime. If you don’t have a specific school in mind try variations on a search query: inurl:crimemap site:edu or campus inurl:map intitle:crime.

What are the top 10 searches in the Google search engine of interest to private investigators? The new Google product, Google Insights, is a Web site optimization tool, or just an amusing time-waster, depending on your inclination.

I searched the phrase “find my”, which returned top searches, listing, “find my ip” and “find my way” — humm, either part of a song or someone who’s lost? It also gave me related terms and “rising searches”, number 6 being “find a person”. Each phrase is assigned a value, 1 to 100, the higher number correlates with more search queries. See the volume plotted on a graph, mapped by region or in a state list. The search can be filtered by state, category or specific dates. Interesting factoid: the number of queries with the phrase “find a person” has declined since 2004.

Search terms related to find a person:

Top searches

1. find people 100
2. person search 85
3. find phone number 80
4. find address 80
5. find someone 30
6. locate a person 20
7. find an address 20

Continue to drill through related terms to phrase searches that are on the uptick, such as “people finders“.

I don’t regularly check the currency of the links in prior postings, but you may have realized that many links on the Internet are good one day and dead the next. One way to find the new page is to backspace to the URL, deleting the subdirectories. Click on this link to see what I mean by an error message. If you backspace to just http://www.indystar.com, you’ll get to the site’s home page. Once you get to the home page search for a tab or drop-down menu related to the content. At the IndyStar site I was looking for the database of live police calls, which in the tabs at the top of the page is “Data Central”, under the “News” tab, and in the body of the Home page is linked to from “More databases.” Confusing, eh?

Visually scan the home page for an icon related to the topic of the former page. Newspaper public records and Sheriff departments “Most Wanted” and “Current Inmates” databases are often only displayed with a button link. The link to the sitemap, a visual representation or topical list of the pages at that Web site is usually found at the top or very bottom of the page, if it’s there at all. As a last resort, use the site’s search engine engine. Usually you’ll do better with a decently formulated search query at Google or Yahoo!. The link to the IndyStar Data Central calls for service to police and fire was the second result in this fairly lame search construction. Often this is good enough to quickly get you to your destination.

How do you find the corrected link after getting an error message page?

I’ve pointed to this collection of free people finding and genealogy tools before. The site wizard, Steve Morse, has added a Social Security number decoder for matching the state of issuance with the number range. It’s a handy place to go when you need to do a quick check.

A pair of computer science students are building the California Newspaper Project, an early stage venture to create a database to search and view entries in historical newspapers. Many other fee-based products, such as NewspaperArchive.com and WorldVitalRecords.com, have traveled down this path. Currently, the San Francisco Call is the only paper indexed. Read more about the development and the aim of this project. State and university archives, which collect historical materials, including newspapers, are listed in this Columbia University assembled subject guide.

There’s a flood of search engines that query the social networking sites only, which may be helpful for finding a site that you already know about, but they won’t snare many sites that you’ll find through a major search engine. I’ve been listing these in my PI buzz Alert newsletter (sign up by selecting the “Subscribe” button in the right sidebar) as they come online. Formulate different queries for a known site through the various search engines to get a sense for how they work and their effectiveness. PeekYou is still in a test mode. Enter a user name as it appears at the social networking site, or a first name and location at AfterVote to retrieve matches at Web sites and social media sites. Read/WriteWeb drew up a list of alternative search engines earlier this year.

The folks at Oakland Crimespotting have elegantly rendered the crime data (if such attributes can be applied to crime) from the Oakland, California CrimeView, operated by the Oakland Police Department.

The Web page opens with crime-specific color coded icons placed at the crime sites on an interactive map. Pan in all directions to easily view the types of reported criminal activity throughout Oakland. Hover over the icon to get a popup listing the date, time and type of crime, and a hypelink report number that opens a larger view of the selected crime area. Receive new crime reports by email or RSS.

The Oakland government CrimeView site takes you through a 5-part process before you get to the crime map. If you want to search by address or intersection and you don’t know where those are on the map, the Oakland government site may be a better starting point. I wrote about this site and other crime mapping links last year. Since then, the LA Times has developed a Homicide Map for Los Angeles.

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.

Google has expanded on its Google Maps feature with two enhancements: My Maps and Street View. Street View is street level photographs of buildings and intersections along the corridors of roads in selective cities. This will remind you city photo lovers of the much missed similar product, A9.

Enter an address located in San Francisco (and other Bay Area cities), New York, Las Vegas, Denver or Miami, navigate along the street in all 4 directions and rotate 360 degrees to view images available from one spot. Surveillance investigators can make use of this in their information gathering prior to an onsite surveillance. Google Maps Mania has links to videos and blog postings on this topic, as well as discussion of the new Mapplet tool that will allow developers to imbed multiple layers of data in maps. Read the Google Press Release

Google rolled out the My Maps feature last month, an easy tool to place icons of user selected sites on a Google Map. Gridskipper has more…

Search for other user created maps by topic, city or other tags at the Programmable Web. Here’s the list of crime maps.

Courts

The North Dakota Supreme Court district court calendars and court case information can be searched by name, citation number, or case number. Municipal court case information is also available for Bismarck, Mandan, Dickinson, Williston, Minot, Devils Lake, Jamestown, Wahpeton, and West Fargo. Supreme Court Announcement

Crime

The Rhode Island Department of Corrections Inmate Search provides details for those currently incarcerated in either a Rhode Island or out of state prison or under home confinement. The database can be searched by partial name and returns an extensive amount of data on past convictions. [Reported in beSpacific]

Search Engines

DormItem is a Craigslist for colleges. Search within a school or across all listed schools by keyword to find people who are selling stuff or have apartments for rent.

This is the sort of topic that those of us in a fairly offbeat line of work, with a twisted sense of the world -which pretty universally applies to private investigators- can appreciate and put to practical use. Let’s start with terrorism, shall we?

The Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism (MIPT), “a non-profit organization dedicated to preventing terrorism on U.S. soil or mitigating its effects”, maps real-time global terrorist threats and events. MIPT also has resources on terrorism-related court cases and terrorist groups and leaders. See all types of worldwide calamities, suspicious activities and threats on the Global Incident Map.

Global health outbreaks, derived from multiple sources, are tracked on HEALTHMap, a project of John Brownstein, Instructor of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and Clark Freifeld, Research Software Developer at the Children’s Hospital Informatics Program. View by disease type, country and recent incidents.

Incident1 is a start-up emergency incidents and crime mapping site. Drawn from law enforcement and highway patrol sources, it aims to be national but is currently limited to a few regions. Search by zip code or the drop-down menu of regions to see recent crime and accidents. IncidentLog covers many local crime, traffic and fire events that aren’t at Incident1. Plot events by type and/or region, state, city or street. IncidentLog also has a running list of the events by selected criteria and provides a link to the source Web site.

A collection of federal agencies collaborated on the live mapping of wildfires, which lists date the fire started and the number of acres involved, as well as a link to the source agency. View fire locations back to 2002. The USDA Forest Service active fires map shows the location of large fires in the US and Canada but seems to have data that is a subset of the wildfires map. Other maps of active fires are found at Geodata.gov.

The new Google My Maps feature enables anyone to easily configure a map with selective features. Google Maps Mania discovered this Google My Maps creation of wildfires in Waycross, Georgia.

Locate recent earthquakes, active volcanoes and tropical storms on the Asia Pacific Natural Hazards and Vulnerabilities Atlas.

Volcanoes, earthquakes, landslides, floods, power outages, epidemics and other unpleasant occurrences are noted on this global map provided by the National Association of Radio-Distress Signalling and Infocommunications, Emergency and Disaster Information Services (EDIS), Budapest Hungary. Scroll beyond the map image for a list of events by date and time.

The National Hurricane Center has lots of live maps of weather patterns.

The International Chamber of Commerce, Commercial Crime Services has a news service of piracy alerts and maps global piracy events. Additional maritime incident data can be gathered from the International Maritime Organization, which provides detailed incident descriptions with free registration.

Even a map of wars and violent conflicts doesn’t cover all disaster events but I wanted to leave room for you to add your own resources!

The general reference reader-edited online encyclopedia, Wikipedia, has spawned niche sites based on the same model and design. I stumbled on the domain directory wiki, AboutUs, which is self described as the “free directory about every domain in the world that anyone can edit.” This may be an advantageous supplement to your favorite domain whois.

And there’s a wiki for news junkies.WikiNews is similar to Newsvine, a participatory site that collects current news from readers and the major outlets.

A report issued by CareerBuilder concludes that 1 in 4 hiring managers have used the Internet to check the background of prospective employees and what they find is a lot of dirt.

Of those hiring managers who used Internet search engines to research job candidates, 51 percent did not hire the person based on what they found. Of those who used social networking sites to research candidates, the majority (63 percent) did not hire the person based on what they found.

Over 60 percent of the managers who search the candidates on social networking sites didn’t hire them! Litigation attorneys take note, and private investigators who delve into traditional background sources for their clients should add Internet search to their list of services.

I was invited to speak at the Southeast Investigators Conference, hosted by GAPPI this past weekend. In my presentation on Internet search I gave examples of the types of information I’ve uncovered on social networking sites, some of it up-to-the-present messages to “friends” about work schedules and activities. This is an arena to mine for personal and work histories and photographs.

Police detectives have discovered that they can get evidence of gang affiliation searching the pages at MySpace, a social networking site that enables people to link Web pages, forming communities of friends.

Photos are posted by people in gang clothing demonstrating gang signs. They also link to friends who are doing the same thing. Everybody wants to be a star.

Here’s the search query I ran using the term “Victimville”, which Victorville, California Detective Jeremy Martinez said is a gang slang for that town, to extract Web pages that include the term “Victimville”. There are about 350 links so probably other locals besides gang members use this appellation. But a search by a gang name returned a manageable three sites. Visit the links on these sites to connect to the Web pages of friends of Victimville (definitely not a library association) residents.