Private Investigator Public Records Internet Search Privacy Reporting – PI Buzz

There are many free news tracking sources that send alerts to your email, RSS reader or are stored at a web-accessible site. Don’t limit yourself to just one aggregator, such as Google News — which is easy to set up and has good coverage. I’ve gathered a list of some other keyword news search and tracking tools to uncover and keep track of the online mentions of your brand, client, opposition or topics of interest.

1. “Ultimate News Database” – infoPig (http://www.infopig.com)
View news on designated topics, by major news outlets or related to geographical regions. You can also construct queries of keywords and receive those in your newsreader.

2. “Personalized News Aggregator” – Meehive (http://www.meehive.com)
Build a newspaper style webpage with custom keywords. No RSS or email export. Invite others to view your page at Meehive or on your social network.

3. “Keyword-Based RSS Feed Generator” – Kebberfegg (http://www.researchbuzz.org/tools/kebberfegg.pl)
Send personalized keyword searches to your newsreader. Search the web, news, blogs and more. The news sources and aggregators identified are: BBC, NewsisFree, FeedsFarm, Google News, IceRocket News, NewsTrove News, RocketNews, Topix.net, FindArticles, Wired, Findory, Yahoo News, MSN News, Moreover, Go Articles, Highbeam.

4. “Most comprehensive index of popularly tracked categories” – Trackle (http://www.trackle.com)
Receive keyword matches on the web, in your email or by RSS. Select the “News and Politics” category to query headline, local, global and topical news sources.

5. USNPL Newspaper Search – (http://is.gd/4eoOV)
Formulate advanced search queries, just as you would at a major search engine, to retrieve results from all newspapers at this site. There’s no RSS feature.

6. “A Top 10 online newspaper destination” – Topix (http://topix.net)
There doesn’t seem to be a convenient RSS feed, so you’ll have to make your own. Create your RSS feed for this site with the URL:

http://www.topix.net/search/article?xml=1&q=%22keyword%22

Replace the term “keyword” with your word or phrase and paste the URL in your newsreader.

7. Real-Time conversation monitoring – Twitter (http://twitter.com)
Select users to follow, or track mentions of your keywords and receive updates by RSS. Other applications offer alternative ways of viewing results and more rapid returns than email, if you’re monitoring in the application. See Monitter (http://www.monitter.com) and TweetDeck (http://tweetdeck.com). These services use the Twitter search engine but the Twitter search (http://search.twitter.com) is more robust, and that’s also viewable in your newsreader. But this searches the postings not the Bio or Name fields. For that see Using Google’s New Features to Get Twitter Information (http://is.gd/4eo3F).

In tip #1 of Finding, Skip Tracing and Locating Women I mentioned one free people finder site and the wildcard tool that can bypass the last name requirement — most helpful in locating women who are probate beneficiaries, potential witnesses in a legal matter or the birth mother of someone relinquished for adoption long ago.

There are many Internet sites for identifying current last names of women — searching by first name only — for whom the investigator may only have a birth name or former married name. Each site returns different results so you’ll want to use more than one, if at first you don’t find what you’re looking for.

At the site, classmates.com, I performed a similar search to the one I did in tip #1, except that there’s no field to restrict the results by year of birth or full birthdate. In that case, I entered just the first name and a state. The results give last names and birth names and the name of the school with the attendance years. You can use this to narrow the birth year. The tip #1 search site returned 17 matches. I supplied first name, age and state. Classmates returned 67 matches associated with first name and state. Very few of these matched the age of the subject, based on the listed graduation years. It’s a limited source but still supplements other sites.

Do you have a favorite website or database that allows searching by first name?

Anyone who finds people for a living, as private investigators do, knows the frustration of locating women. They change their names. Often many times over the course of their lives. This is a challenge to the heir finder who has a name from many years in the past that she has to update in order to locate her subject.

Use the free portion of a people finder site that allows you to search by first name and date of birth. But you also have to use a workaround on sites that require a last name to perform the search. This involves the handy wildcard. In this case, we’ll apply the asterisk.

At the site peoplefinders.com enter a first name in that field and an asterisk (*) in the last name field. Add date of birth or year of birth. This will work until the search interface is changed — which may happen just as soon as the powers that be see this tip!

That’s tip #1 in Finding, Skip Tracing and Locating Women. Do you know of other sites where a skip trace by first name can be performed?