Introduction to Social Media Investigation: A Hands-on Approach, 1st Edition (2015)
Chapter 5. Finding people on social media
Abstract
There are general techniques you can use to find people on any social media site. Using common usernames, email addresses, and profile photos are just a few options. This chapter introduces some of these social media search techniques.
Keywords
Social media
Social networks
Search
Each of the chapters in this book that is about a specific social media site (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn) has sections that are specifically about finding people. If you're interested in finding someone on those sites, it's always a good idea to do a search for them there.
However, there are also more general techniques you can use to find people on any social media site. This chapter introduces some of those.
The Importance of Usernames
Everyone needs a username to be on a social media site. This is the unique name they use to login and it often appears in the web address (URL) of their page on the site. For example, if a person's username is “malcomcsmith,” his Facebook page is athttp://facebook.com/malcomcsmith and his Twitter page is at http://twitter.com/malcomcsmith.
People frequently reuse their usernames across sites. Thus, if you know someone's username in one place, you can often use it to find other accounts. So how do you find someone's username?
The email address is a good place to start. If you only have an email address, you might try using the part before the @ in the address as a username. For example, if the target's email is malcomcsmith@gmail.com, you can use “malcomcsmith” as a first guess at a username.
Email is also an important clue, even if the first part is not the target's username on other services. Many sites allow you to search for the email address a person used to register and will then return a link to their page—including showing their username. Once you know someone's username on one site, you can use it to search for them on other sites as well. Thus, email addresses—even old ones that are not active anymore—and known usernames are good places to start finding people on social media.
Finding People
By Google Search Techniques
Google is a great source for finding social media pages about people, and sometimes, it returns better results than the social media sites' own internal search tools. To use it effectively, there are a few advanced Google search tools that will help you.
Searching Domains
First is the ability to search within a site or domain. A domain is the core part of a web address, usually the last two parts. For example, facebook.com, twitter.com, npr.org, and example.net are all domains. Google allows you to use the domain for a site to search on that site only. To do this, you use the prefix “site:,” followed by the domain. For example, if we wanted to search for our example user Malcom Conroy-Smith on Twitter, we would search for his name and then add site:twitter.com (Figure 5.1).
FIGURE 5.1 A Google search with a site term that restricts the results to a particular domain.
This search will look for the words Malcom and Conroy-Smith only on twitter.com.
Searching for Exact Phrases
When you use multiple words in a Google search, Google searches for all of those words in any order and will also look for pages that have only one of the words. Google will sometimes even make best guesses at close matches. In this case, it may find people named Malcom Smith. That flexibility in search can be very helpful, but sometimes, it returns too many results. To search for the exact name you want, you can put it in quotes. In that case, Google will only return pages with an exact match for the phrase in quotes (see Figure 5.2).
FIGURE 5.2 Using quotes around a term on a Google search forces Google to search for that exact phrase.
Searching Images
If there are many search results returned, a Google image search for the same term may be effective. In Figure 5.2, under the search box, you can see a list of search types (“Web,” “Videos,” “News,” “Images,” etc.). If you click on Images, it will take you to a set of search results with photos only. If you include the “site:” part of the search, it will return images from that site only. Thus, you will often find profile pictures with this kind of image search.
If you happen to have a photograph of the target, especially if it is a profile picture from another site, Google has an image search functionality that can help there, too. Go to the Google Images search page, either as described above or by going tohttp://images.google.com. On the right side of the search box, there is a camera icon. This is their “Search by Image” feature. It allows you to upload a picture and it searches for matching and near-matching images. Figure 5.3 shows the main Google image search page.
FIGURE 5.3 The Google Images search page. Note the camera icon on the right of the search box; click it to Search by Image.
Click on the camera icon to bring up the dialog box to search for matching images. Figure 5.4 shows the page that comes up. If you have the web address of the image of interest, you can paste it in this search box.
FIGURE 5.4 The default Search by Image box where you can input the web address (URL) of an image.
If you do not have an online version of the image, click the “Upload an image” text next to the “Paste image URL” tab. That will bring up a dialog box, shown in Figure 5.5, where you can select the image from your computer. Then click the “Search by Image” button next to the search box. The results will include exact matches and visually similar images.
FIGURE 5.5 The “Upload an image” tab allows you to choose an image file from your computer to search.
A matching image result could take you to the target's other social media sites, websites where they have profiles, or pages where they are mentioned.
By Cache or Archive
Before we move on entirely from Google, there is one other Google search tool that may be of value: the “cache” option, which can show you old versions of a page. For example, if your target once had a public page on a social media site, but now it is protected, you can search for cache:[url] where you replace [url] with the web address of the page. That will show you an older version of the page.
If you want to see many previous versions of someone's social media page, try using the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. This is, as the name suggests, an archive of the internet. Available at http://archive.org, you can put in the URL of any web page and see older copies that the service has saved. For example, Figure 5.6 shows the results for the author's personal Twitter page at http://twitter.com/golbeck.
FIGURE 5.6 The Internet Archive results for the author's personal Twitter feed.
The time line at the top shows years across the bottom with markers indicating the dates the page was saved. Clicking on a year brings up a calendar underneath the time line. Dates with archived pages are highlighted in blue. Clicking on a date brings up the archived version of the page. The Internet Archive works for many pages besides social media, but this can be an effective way to locate old online data in some cases.
There are other ways beyond Google to find current social media pages, too. Social media search engines take names or possible usernames as input and then search across social media sites to find accounts. These services are constantly changing, and the companion website for the book has an updated list. A Google search for “social search engine” will likely bring up the latest results.
By Other Services
Finally, people finding/background check services on the web may be a good source of background information. While most of these search tools provide things like names, addresses, and phone numbers, instead of links to social media sites, some have email addresses that are useful for username tracking as described above. Furthermore, additional information about a target that these sites provide, like his current city, could be useful in narrowing down search results on specific social media sites to identify the correct person.
By Other Techniques and Considerations
There are other techniques you can use to find people online. One of the most effective is to search through the target's known associates. Even if your target is online, he may use a fake or abbreviated name that makes him hard to find. He may even have most of his profile private and protected. However, a target's friends are not always as careful, and this can make them a useful source of information to locate the target's account or find public information about him.
Each chapter of this book that deals with specific social media sites includes information on how to find associates' accounts and look for the target among their social contacts, but there are some general rules that are useful to know.
First, if you want to find a person's profile on a social media site, you can begin by finding his known associates. At least some friends and family members are likely to have accounts somewhere, since many social media tools have hundreds of millions of users. Once you have located associates (using some of the tips above, if simple searches on the social media site don't turn them up), you can look at their social connections. It is possible your target will be identifiable in that list, by either photo or name.
Even if you can't find a profile for your target in his associate's contact lists, you may be able to find information about him posted by the associate. Look through the associate's photos, posts, and other information. It is possible you will come across information about the target in this way.
Regardless of where you find information—from social media sites, web searches, or on other people's social media pages—it is important to remember that social media is not an authoritative information source.
Case Study
One of my clients—let's call him “Fred”—was trying to track down someone for whom they had no contact information. We knew Fred had grown up in Johnston, Iowa, a suburb of Des Moines. He later attended the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and then moved to Dearborn, just outside of Detroit. At the time of our search, we knew he was 35 years old.
Fred had a common last name, so there were many people with the same name. However, a few searches turned up a man with his name but with some inaccurate information. One page listed his previous residence as Urbandale, Iowa, the next town over from his hometown of Johnston. There was no mention of his actual hometown of Johnston. There was also no mention of Dexter, Michigan, where we knew Fred lived. However, the same person who appeared to be from Urbandale, Iowa, was listed as living in Detroit. His age appeared as 39 years old.
So was this the Fred we were searching for or not? My client was deeply worried that it was a different person, but the fact is that probabilities suggest it was indeed the right Fred. Location information can come from many places. While Fred may have never lived in Urbandale, Iowa, the fact that it shared a border with his hometown of Johnston means that he likely had connections to Urbandale. He may have worked there, attended high school there, or have used a friend's address in Urbandale at one point.
Similarly, it is very common to see people listed as living in the large city closest to them. It is not unusual to see the names of little-known suburbs dropped in favor of an identifiable city. And, as was the case with Fred's hometown, it would be likely that Fred worked, had a post-office box, or maintained some other connection to the neighboring large city of Detroit.
Finally, the age of the Fred we found was 4 years older than the Fred we were searching for. People lie about their birthdays and age all the time on social media. This may be to protect their privacy, to throw off potential investigators, or simply for amusement. Even ages that are pulled from external data sources instead of being supplied by the user can be wrong for a variety of reasons.
The important consideration is probability. What is the likelihood that there was another guy with the same first and last name as our Fred who grew up very near where our Fred grew up, who was close in age, and who moved to the same city several states away? While it is certainly possible, the probability of this is low, and it is reasonable to assume that the Fred we found is the Fred we were looking for. Indeed, in this case, the slightly off version of Fred was indeed the target, and using the profile we found, my client was able to make contact and resolve her issue.
Conclusions
As a starting point for finding people on social media, your best bet is to search for them on the specific sites you care about. Details for how to conduct those searches are contained in the relevant chapters in this book. However, there are useful higher-level tips.
People often reuse their usernames. Thus, if you can find someone on a particular site, the username there may be the same as the username on other sites. Similarly, if you have an email address for someone, you may be able to search for accounts by email or use the part of the address before the “@” sign as a best guess at a username.
Google and other services offer a number of search tools and operators that will help you find people on particular sites and more broadly on the web. Older versions of pages may be cached at Google or available in the Internet Archive, and these can be useful in learning if you have found the correct account for someone.
Finally, searching for people through their associates and allowing for flexibility and some incorrectness in search results will help you discover targets in ways that you might not have initially expected.