OSINT: Advanced Search Skills

Open enrolment and in-house options available

Knowledge of Google’s search operators is no longer sufficient for research professionals. Knowing how to navigate the many levels of the internet and overcome the limitations of traditional search engines is key to surfacing competitive insights or advancing national policies. This course will show you how to plan, organise and execute a range of research projects, leverage an extended set of search tools and strategies, and mine the internet for different insights, expertise and content types. Further, we will show you how to capture, organise and process the data you collect for analysis and reporting purposes. Finally, we will provide guidance on how to sustain your knowledge of the OSINT discipline and which sources you should consult for learning and inspiration.

There are currently no dates planned for this course. Register your interest for future dates or enquire about in-house options.

Course Outline

Mastering Google

Introduction

  • Advanced search: challenges, principles, and axioms for OSINT practitioners
  • Advanced search strategies
  • Searching across the many levels of the internet
  • Crowdsourcing information requirements

Advanced Keyword Indexing

  • Extending your keyword index
  • Keyword research tools
  • Working with online dictionaries
  • Working with SEO tools

Advanced Search Strategies
for Google

  • Mining the web with advanced queries
  • Working with URL conventions
  • Working with search parameters
  • Working with dork and exploit databases
  • Searching in foreign languages
  • Managing and manipulating your results
  • Developing a custom search cookbook

Mastering the "Spider Crawl"

  • The art of paying attention
  • Working with SERP analysers
  • Using URLs as search clues
  • Finding hidden information in websites

Going Beyond Google

Searching Beyond Google

  • The varieties of search engines
  • Choosing the right search engine
  • Working with Bing, DuckDuckGo and Yandex
  • Layering and comparing results
  • Working with foreign-language and specialist search engines

Custom Search

  • Building a custom search engine (CSE)
  • Finding CSEs
  • Monitoring the web for new CSEs

Mining the Deep Web

  • Deep web search strategies
  • Working with directories and databases
  • Finding cached and archived data
  • URL manipulation for deep web research

Searching for Specific Content Types

Searching for Documents

  • Document search strategies
  • Advanced search queries
  • Document search tools
  • Searching cloud-based repositories
  • Research and academic resources
  • FTP search tools and resources

Searching for Images

  • Image search strategies and resources
  • Reverse image search tools
  • Investigating image metadata
  • Processing images
  • Validating images

Searching for Video

  • Video search strategies and resources
  • Working with video hosting platforms
  • Investigating video metadata
  • Reverse video search
  • Downloading videos
  • Video editing for analysis and reporting
  • Validating videos

Searching for Audio

  • Working with online radio
  • Working with podcasts
  • Podcast directories
  • Generating transcripts
  • Audio recording and editing

Generating Location-Specific Results

  • Thinking spatially on the web
  • Generating location-specific queries
  • Location based search tools
  • Simulating a location via Google Chrome

Managing Your Search Results

Web Scraping

  • Working with data scrapers
  • Scraping data via Google Sheets

Advanced Research and Data Management

  • Personalising your research productivity
  • Key principles of effective data management
  • Understanding data quality issues
  • Data validation schemas

Self-managed Learning for OSINT Researchers

  • Recommended learning strategies
  • Defining a learning agenda
  • Journaling
  • Cultivating knowledge beyond OSINT
There are currently no dates planned for this course. Register your interest for future dates or enquire about in-house options.

Course Details

Who is this Course For?

This course is intended for researchers and investigators wishing to strengthen their portfolio of online research skills.

How You Benefit

On completion of this course you will have the ability to:

  • Maximise your research efficiency and effectiveness
  • Apply an extended portfolio of search tools and strategies
  • Mine the many levels of the internet for relevant information
  • Develop and maintain custom search tools
  • Find, validate and process foreign language content
  • Find, validate and process multimedia content
  • Validate the information collected using different schemas
  • Use web scrapers to capture and organise relevant information
  • Manage your research findings to improve learning and sharing
  • Create an action plan to develop and maintain your OSINT skills

What You Receive

  • A full set of course slides / user guides in PDF
  • Tip sheets and cheat sheets to enable rapid learning
  • An index of research workflows
  • An index of recommended OSINT sources
  • Six months of post-course support

Course Prerequisites

This course assumes you are familiar with basic search operators and generic OSINT processes (requirements planning, keyword indexing, data collection, data collation, etc.). We also assume you have a solid working knowledge of major web services and social media platforms. We recommend that participants wishing to take this course first complete our OSINT: Foundations course.

Course Requirements

Please bring a Windows or Mac laptop and ensure you have full administrative rights to this device. You should install Google’s Chrome browser and set up a Google account to facilitate the use of different tools. Additional software requirements will be sent prior to the start of the course.