WEB 2.0 APPLICATIONS FOR PRIVATE INVESTIGATORS
The Internet has come a long way, and it has much to offer us these days. Here I want to give the reader some REAL useful applications that are all free of charge, and can have a real impact on our businesses. I think this page will be useful to everyone.
Let me say two things here before I begin. Number one (1) if you are going to use some of the On-Line Office Sites, then you are going top be trusting the people that run these sites with your information, so please consider that if you use these types of sites. Number two (2) invariably, some Private Investigator will say "But Rick, you are giving away the farm". Well, that's simply not true, all of these sites are already public and available to anyone that wants to take the time to find them. However, a good Private Investigator should be able to do more with these sites than the average consumer, because he or she should have more of an investigative knowledge of how to further the results from these sites, how fromat those results, and how to accurately report these results.
I am going to classify these application into three different categories as follows: Specialty Search Engines, Investigative Tools, and On-Line Office Sites. These applications will assist you in people locates, basic background investigations, Internet profiling, basic information gathering, research, case management, report writing, competitive intelligence and more.
You will have to register for some of these sites, but I none of these sites have taken me over 1 minute to register on, registration is fast, free, and easy.
First let's start with Specialty Search Engines. I have found some pretty nice search engines that seem to focus more on what we as Private Investigators want to glean from the net. Below Are the Specialty Search Engine Sites that I have found:
All That : This search engine seems to be a really unique search engine, it has the option to continually scan the Internet for new content on your subject after you have stopped searching. All that also lets you add or subtract what directories and search engines you want to search.
Grokker : A nice, visual search engine that will allow you to see your search results mapped in a relational form.
Political Base : For those of you gathering political information, this search engine is not a bad place to start.
SBroWs : A fair, but up and coming visual search engine powered by Google.
Search Crystal : One of the best visual search engines that I have seen in a while.
Search Me : Another really nice visual search engine.
Touch Graph : A Java based visual search engine that lets you save your results, and also lets you see relationships between your results.
Viygo : Do you like time lines? Want to build your own time line? Want to search for Internet content in a time line format? You are going to LOVE this!
Now lets get started on investigative tools. I have to tell you, after some research, I became impressed at what you can REALLY find on the Internet. No, I am not talking about what the Internet Profiling Guru's will tell you. I am talking about real, accurate, private data; that is freely available on the Internet. It is amazing! As an experiment, I built a report with the Investigative tools I am listing below, and it was almost as in-depth and thorough as one of my better proprietary database reports is.
Peek You : A good Investigative Tool for gathering cursory information about a person.
Pipl : Want to locate someone? Want to get some good basic background information on someone? This site will help a great deal.
Rap Leaf : Look up an email address. This site tries to locate the owner of a given email address.
Rotten Neighbor : Another way to dig up dirt on a person, with a focus on what their neighbors have to say about them.
Signal Map : Check out various cellular carriers coverage.
Spy Pig : Email receipt program that is absolutely FREE. It is kind of like Read Notify, but free.
Sullr : A nice reverse phone directory. I did reverse a few numbers on here that I could not reverse on other directories.
YoName : Another good search site for personal background information.
Your Street : Find out what is happening in your area, or someone else's area.
Zoom Info : More background information, with an emphasis on employment history.
Now lets move onto some applications that may be useful in helping you to manage your time, your finances, the information you are collecting, and may even assist you in writing better reports and collaborating with other Investigators.
Financify : Keep track of your accounts, your spending, and how much money you are making. This is a nice site, but you are trusting the owners of this site with your financial information if you use it.
Fliiby : This is a good site to store documents, videos, audio files, and pictures. Unlimited storage for free, however each file must be under 100 MB. And there are some funny videos here to boot.
Project Office : Your FREE office on the Web. This is a great way to get organized, and to collaborate with others on the Internet
Rival Map : A really good site for tracking your competition, and using this information to grow your business. Competitive Intelligence at it's finest.
Santex Q : Another Internet Office Site, here you can do billing, time management, reports, and tasking.
Trendrr : incorporate graphs into your reports, turn your data into beautiful visual graphs.
Web Asyst : A set of office tools that you can use to get organized.
Well, these are a few applications that I'd like to share with my fellow Private Investigators, and the public. I would like to give a little advice to the consumer that might try to use these application to do their own investigative work. DON'T! Why? Because whether you choose to believe it or not, the fact is that a Private Investigator will know more about how to verify the information from these sites, protect you from making foolish mistakes with the information from these sites, how to further develop even more information that the average consumer can from the information made available on these sites, and how to present the information from these sites in a more comprehensive format that the average consumer will. If you have a case that is going to court, or you have a need to gather information for a critical purpose, please don't try to save a little money only to potentially lose A LOT of money by trying to do it yourself, when you don't have the experience or knowledge to. Remember, you get what you pay for, and nothing here costs any money at all!
Ricky B. Gurley