Open-source intelligence (OSINT) is a technique for collecting information gathering that available to public. OSINT practice is already has been used for a long time ago especially for intelligence. Keyword research is one of the crucial things for OSINT. This time, I will explain about keyword research with most popular search engine Google.
Search Engine
Have u used Google before? Well, everyone maybe at least one times using it. It’s one the most popular search engine that widely used compares to Bing, Yahoo, Baidu, etc. So, how search engine works? Search engine show all webpages by crawling and indexing all web that found. You can learn more about how search engine work by go to this link. You can image if right now there is not search engine available. If you want some information you have go to website one to another, asking someone, went to the library.
It’s going to be a daunting task and consume a considerable amount of time for each search. With the help of search engine that continuously update their index by crawling active websites, we can get amount of information that we looking for in a second. This is one the advantages that we can use as OSINT investigator. So, below is some of the trick that we can use to do some keyword research at the beginning of gathering information. Okay then, here we go!
- Search keyword at social media account for example at Facebook, Twitter or Instagram. To looking specific information for example person name you can use “@”. If you looking person name with @facebook:person name, it will retrieve and show you all result within Facebook with that name in front page. You can use this trick with another social media platform like Instagram and Twitter.
- Another trick that you can use is the hashtag (#) symbol. Hashtag is word or phrase that used on social media to explain certain topic. Just use hashtag with followed by # and it will show you all result that related to the hashtag.
- To show map or specific place you can use “map”. For example map:Japan
- You can quick show information about stocks a company by using stocks:bbca
- Another example is keyword “cache”. Cache:facebook.com it show you cache version of the website
- If you looking for information about music or movie you can use keyword movie:keyword or music:keyword
- With quotation mark (“keyword”), it will retrieve all result that match exact phrase or word. For example, your keyword #osint it will retrieve all result that related to the hashtag.
- Define:keyword will return definition that related to that keyword
- Use define to search for related website, for example related:facebook.com
Conclusion
Using search engine technology can boost your time to looking quick information. It’s very useful at the beginning phase of your OSINT investigation. All the trick that I show you before it just some of them. Actually, there a lot of tricks out there. Keyword research with search engine is one the powerful tool and free to use, but there is another popular technique that you can use is call Google Dork. Well, that going to be my article in the future. Thank you and see you in the next article.
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