Searching “McEachin” in Google I get 37 hits. Doing the same search in SlideFinder, I get one hit. In the Google results, the SlideFinder result appears third from the bottom with a different file name than found by SlideFinder.

According the SlideFinder  blog, they concentrate on indexing presentations from university websites as these “will often contain high quality content.” The blog is worth following if you regularly search for PowerPoint presentations.

This thing works very well for finding references to company names and Web sites. The person who prepared the presentation usually knows things that interest me. It’s usually easy to find the person who made the PowerPoint file. Write-out my questions, make a telephone call, get answers, write report, and move on to the next job.

Previously, I wrote about file searches using OSUN.ORG.

findthatfile.com provides a file search  encompassing Web, FTP, Usenet, Metalink and P2P resources (ed2k/emule) including 47 file types and 554+ file extensions including over 167 file upload services. It also offers an alert service sent to your email.

However, not all information in the search database has every property you might be searching for, therefore, you have to explore the different ways to search for the file in the advanced search screen.

In my experience, this is not a good search engine to use to search by a person’s name or a company name. The files are not well indexed in this fashion.  One must also be careful to select the “All Files” button in the “Adult Filter” to be sure all the files found appear in the search results.

I usually search by a file name for other versions of a file that I already know about. In some cases, findthatfile.com will give me an understanding of how widely circulated a file may be, or turn-up different versions of the same file.

This excellent article by Lawrence Solomon illustrates why a researcher or investigator must use more than one search engine.

Googlegate: The search engine may be standing up to Chinese censors. What about Google’s own censors? 

Search for “Googlegate” on Google and you’ll get a paltry result (my result yesterday was 29,300). Search for “Googlegate” on Bing, Microsoft’s search engine competitor, and the result numbers an eye-popping 72.4 million. If you’re a regular Google user, as opposed to a Bing user, you might not even know that “Googlegate” has been a hot topic for years in the blogosphere — that’s the power that comes of being able to control information.

… Google began to minimize the Climategate scandal by hiding Climategate pages from its users.

Bing, in contrast, didn’t make climategate pages disappear. As you’d expect from a search engine that wasn’t manipulating data, search results on Bing climbed steadily until they peaked at around 51 million…

OSUN.ORG

OSUN.ORG provides a simple interface for searching PDF documents, MSWord documents, and PowerPoint files. The large search engines allow one to search more file types and you must search one file type at a time using OSUN.ORG as you do in Google. I don’t know what database this search engine uses, but it doesn’t compare very well with Google. A search for my name in PDF files give 52 results in Google and only 9 in OSUN.ORG. This is not a good performance.

Sometimes it’s really hard to find an alternative to the big three search engines.

This indicates the average salary stated in job postings is $45,500 nationally and that on a national basis, Private Investigators earn about $7200 less than that average.

According to the site, DevilFinder began as a project to display results from search engines like Google and Yahoo without setting cookies while presenting fewer pages of results.  It does not collect search data from users and no invasive cookies or JavaScript is used.

DevilFinder seems to rank the search results on the search term alone, rather than a combination of relevance and the popularity of the site. This is why relevant results from less popular sites may appear  at the top. It is might also be the reason the result set is so small. DevilFinder shows the results arranged 100 per page and I rarely get more than 2 pages.

The Image search works quite well. The images are much larger than  other search engines. The Video search only returned hits from Youtube for any search I have done - not exactly useful. To be fair the Video search seems to be a new feature. The News tab is just a crude collection of feeds that aren’t searchable.

Search Strategy

This has become a favorite choice for searching the names of people and companies. The results often provide more useful sites in the first page than Google and I don’t have to go to the last page of results to find out what wasn’t searched, as I do with Google.

For long, complex search statements, I still rely on Google, Bing, and Yahoo!, but for searching names and some other common short search statements, DevilFinder does an excellent job and sometimes a better job than the big guys.

The investigative process does not belong to the police or private detective.  Investigation is at the heart of every human activity. Scholars investigate. Antique dealers and appraisers investigate. Investors investigate. Medical Doctors investigate. In one way or another, we all investigate something or other. To investigate is to seek a solution. It is the application of information collection skills,  logic, and analytical skills.

This is the last article of 2009.  The next article will appear on Google-Free Wednesday, 6 January 2010.