How Can Google Be Sharpened as a Tool?
If you are hoping to perform an effective search on Google, Boolean search operators are your best friend. If you do not know what these are, familiarize yourself with them. The most useful operator is “search term.” Words or phrases within quotation marks are not case sensitive. However, it is important to try different variations of the term and enclose different parts of the name in quotation marks so that you are not unintentionally limiting your results. For example, see the difference between c&d international fishery and “c&d” international fishery. In this case, the Boolean operator has excluded the company’s SeafoodSource profile because that website records it as C & D.
It is also smart to try different variants of your search term in quotes, such as “fu yuan yu 9803,” “fuyuanyu9803,” and “fuyuanyu 9803.” Any researcher would be wise to use this tactic for searches on other platforms as well. The second most useful Boolean operator is AND. To demonstrate its usefulness, take for example our investigation into China’s squid fishing fleet. The AND operator allowed us to perform searches such as “company name” AND “squid” or “company name” AND “calamari.”
Filetype searches can also be useful if you have an idea of what kinds of files you might want. For example, to find PDFs that contain a certain vessel name, you could search “vesselname” filetype:PDF. You can also specify when you are searching for an XLS, XLSX, DOC, or DOCX file. To search only on a specific site, type “site:” followed by the URL. For example, to search for a specific term only on YouTube, you would type: “term” site:youtube.com.
Google Images can also be used for rough translation and text search from a PDF. Upload a screenshot of the text you want to translate to Google Images, then click on the “Translate” option at the bottom of the screen. Language options will appear in a bar at the top of the screen. The translated text will show up on the right alongside the uploaded image. You can also use this feature to search the web for that text, by clicking on “text” instead of “translate” and highlighting the portion you want to search for online. Another tool to translate text is via Google Lens. If you have text on your computer screen and want to translate it, you can use Google Lens via your phone to get an approximate translation. You can also reverse image search pictures via Google Images, including ships, logos, and more. This can be helpful to find articles that highlight a specific ship or find a specific branded product across online grocers.
Often, you will want to limit your searches for clips and other information to only show results from the past five years. To narrow down the field of your search, click “tools” after searching and adjust the time range. If you want to search something but limit it by region or language, use Google Advanced Search.
In certain contexts, Google may not be the most suitable search engine to use. Baidu and Sogou are important alternatives for searching for Chinese state media coverage, corporate reports, or company records, and Yandex is a Russian alternative that provides additional results beyond what is available via Google. Ensure you are using the proper local language keywords to get the best results. For security, you may wish to use a VPN to access sites controlled by the Chinese or Russian state.
What Are Useful Platforms for Open-Source Footage?
In combination with reporting on the ground, open-source intelligence gathering, or OSINT, can be a rich source of information for your investigation. Where and how you search will often depend on your reporting targets and their geographic context, but below are various tools you might use as a starting point.
For footage showing a specific vessel or fleet, you can search the video archives provided by Greenpeace and DVIDS (Coast Guard), in addition to social media platforms. YouTube’s native search function is poor, so to return better results, perform a site search through Google (for example, you would search: “fu yuan yu 9803” site:youtube.com). This tool enables you to search for all the YouTube videos in a certain channel or returned from a certain query and download them in a spreadsheet. If the entity you are searching for is not based in an English-speaking country, it is always a good idea to search the target term in the applicable foreign language (for example, search the name of a Russian vessel in Russian). If you do a reverse image search on the thumbnails from a video through Invid, sometimes you can find a fuller length version of it elsewhere.
Facebook also has a poor native search function, so you should try site searches on Google in tandem with your research on the platform. Facebook has a great trove of photos and videos of vessels taken by ship workers onboard. To best capture all the material, scroll through the results in the “Posts,” “Photos,” and “Videos” tabs on the left sidebar. Facebook sometimes indexes text in photos, which means it will return images that contain the term you are searching. Searching for the name or registration number of your vessel of interest may yield results in the “Photos” tab.
When you perform a search on Facebook, try different variations of the name of the entity you are trying to find. For example, during our investigation into migrant prisons in Libya, we used different iterations of certain migrants’ names, like “aliou cande,” “alioucande.” When searching for intel about specific vessels throughout our investigation into China’s distant-water fishing fleet, we used several iterations of a vessel’s name, like “lu yan yuan yu 10” or “luyanyuanyu010.” When you are searching for specific entities, think of the language and terms that the poster most likely would have used. For example, if you are looking for something posted by an Indonesian deckhand, search in Indonesian. If you are looking for something posted by a Filipino deckhand, try searching in Tagalog or Cebuano. (Deepl and Google Translate are great resources for machine translations.) When someone’s Facebook page is set to private, you can sometimes bypass that (depending on their settings) by searching their name broadly from Facebook’s home page, then clicking on “Posts.” You can also simply send them a friend request. By searching a ship name on Facebook, you can find a worker who posted a photo or video from that ship, then locate other potential sources by looking at who was tagged in their posts or friends of theirs who have made similar posts in the same time frame.
On Twitter, or X, use the Advanced Search function to tailor your searches and filter out unwanted results. Search the term both with proper spacing (fu yuan yu 9803) and as one single string (fuyuanyu9803). You can also search by location. Insert in search box: geocode:[coordinates],[radius-km], for example: geocode:38.897957,-77.036560,2km
On Instagram, search for your term both with proper spacing (fu yuan yu 9803) and as one single string (fuyuanyu9803). Make sure to search the term preceded by a hashtag (#fuyuanyu9803) to see if any results populate. You can also search for tagged posts by running a Google search with the Instagram user’s handle in quotation marks (i.e. “@example”). If you know your target may have been present in a certain region, you can try searching for geotagged posts around a location of interest — for example, a port or village where you know the vessel of interest was operating. To do so, search for a certain place on Instagram, and look at the posts that come up. If any of them have location tags, you can click on that tag and see other posts that have been similarly tagged. You can also search for named locations or businesses around a port area to find more photos of your vessel of interest.
Our investigations have shown why China should be considered the “superpower of seafood,” and the country has its own web ecosystem. Video sharing sites such as Douyin and Xiaohongshu can provide visual evidence from Chinese vessels and factories. Search Chinese-language keywords and hashtags, and deep dive into account histories and comments to build out networks of accounts related to a particular location or topic. WeChat is another important source of visual content, and it too can be searched for individual, vessel or company names. Take care installing Chinese apps and content on your phone or laptop; if there are concerns about security, use a burner phone and/or a VPN to mask your location and identity.
How Can You Download Videos from Social-Media Platforms?
To download a local copy of a video from TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, or another social-media platform, go to DLPanda, choose the platform you are downloading content from (options are below the bar where you’ll paste your URL), copy and paste the URL to the content, click “Download,” then scroll down and click “Download video.” If you need to download a video from a private Facebook page or group, you can try pasting the page source from the video into pastedownload.com.
What Are Useful Resources for Tracking Ships?
When building a list of vessels tied to crimes, including forced labor and illegal fishing, for the investigation such as “China: The Superpower of Seafood” in 2023, we cross-checked each ship on our list with several searchable databases that offer up-to-date information about vessel positions, criminal histories, and beneficial ownership. Global Fishing Watch (GFW) and MarineTraffic (paid) offer real-time tracking of vessel positions based on automatic identification system (AIS) data. Global Fishing Watch, Environmental Justice Foundation and MongaBay have produced a helpful overview video on approaches and tools. Several tailored tools from Global Fishing Watch are worth highlighting: for tracking marine-protected areas (MPAs), for tracking transshipment and for tracking vessel histories. Global Fishing Watch also has its Carrier Vessel Portal, which allows you to find specific encounter and loitering events for refrigerated cargo ships. Because fishing vessels often take their catch and transfer it to refrigerated vessels that in turn carry this catch back to shore, sometimes it is important to be able to track seafood from the fishing vessel to the carrier vessel to the port using this tool. Sayari has a very basic but possibly helpful tip sheet that can help a researcher start thinking about tactics. An interactive map for looking at marine-protected areas and the laws and regulations that govern them is published by Protected Seas, a marine conservation group associated with the Anthropocene Institute.
For satellite imagery and help detecting “dark” vessels that are not broadcasting AIS data, it is worth registering with Skylight, another monitoring platform that can be accessed for free. Sentinel Hub is a free website that provides low resolution satellite imagery for anywhere in the world approximately every five days. While it may not offer imagery for areas far out at sea, it will have captures for ports and waters close to the coast. It can be useful for determining when vessels enter and depart ports, and when they are operating closer to shore. After reviewing snapshots from the free version of this tool, you can also submit requests for paid, higher resolution imagery.
Lloyds Register, IHS by S&P, and the International Maritime Organization (IMO) contain information on ships and other types of assets; costs to register with Lloyds and IHS vary but you can create a free account to use the IMO site. The FAO also provides a Fishing Vessels Finder. You can search their data using identifiers such as IMO number, MMSI, name, or flag. (Check Inmarsat’s directory to retrieve this information for a specific vessel if you cannot find it elsewhere.) If you only have an IRCS or MMSI identifier and no information is forthcoming from searches, the International Transportation Union (ITU) provides lists of prefixes for these numbers which indicate the country flag (see section ‘GLAD’ in the link).
Powered by AI, Cerulean is a free, open source, interactive map that automatically scans incoming radar satellite images to continuously detect and delineate oil slicks, and analyzes millions of AIS vessel tracking broadcasts and thousands of oil platform locations to pinpoint the likely sources. Cerulean can help users identify and illustrate patterns of chronic oil pollution globally, as well as in specific geographies including marine protected areas.
Some organizations specialize in investigating vessel activities and compliance at sea. They can gather a wider range of data than can be accessed publicly and use specialized tools and analysts.
Such organizations can be contracted to assess particular cases, geographies or fleets and include OceanMind, GFW and TMT. For a more comprehensive list of ship tracking resources, see this directory from the Global Investigative Journalism Network.
Where Can You Go to Learn About a Ship’s Criminal History?
To find a ship’s criminal history, you can consult TMT’s IUU Vessel List, which records if a vessel has ever been red-listed by a regional fisheries-management organization, or RFMO. The list offers the best available information regarding changes to vessel identity, flag state, ownership, location, and operations. Spyglass publishes information on the criminal records of fishing vessels and companies around the globe. The Center for Advanced Defense Studies, or C4ADS, offers a Sanctions Explorer that enables you to search across global sanctions lists for your vessel of interest. The International Labour Organization’s Seafarer Abandonment list contains a regularly updated list of vessels that have been reported as abandoned in various ports of the world. A 2022 report by the Financial Transparency Network provides a summary of recent cases of illegal fishing and an analysis of the beneficial ownership networks behind the vessels and companies implicated. The Environmental Justice Foundation, or EJF, may have also put out a report about your vessel of interest.
The Outlaw Ocean Project offers its own searchable tool, Bait to Plate, which provides information about the criminal history and supply-chain connections of more than 300 vessels and 30 processors. To see what seafood companies have been queried in the past about crimes or concerns within their supply chains, please search the Outlaw Ocean Project’s Discussion tool.
To find a ship’s beneficial, or ultimate, owner, you can check Equasis, which maps this information. (Equasis is free, but requires registration.) C4ADS also runs a tool called Triton, a database of vessels and their beneficial ownership. The International Maritime Organization has this page where it offers some details about ship ownership.
What Government Resources Exist for Researching Human Rights and Labor Concerns Tied to Seafood?
A good place to begin with for intelligence about global ocean crimes is the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which produces a biennial report on the prevalence of illegal, unregulated, and unreported (IUU) fishing in several countries.
There are several other helpful resources that do not focus solely on crimes at sea and along the seafood supply chain, but often touch on these issues. Three systems used to highlight countries that are subpar with regard to labor and human rights concerns are the EU Carding Decisions, which rate countries on their efforts to combat illegal fishing; the U.S. State Department’s Trafficking in Persons Reports, an annual guide that rates countries on their risk level for human trafficking and their efforts, if any, to address the issue; and the U.S. Bureau of International Labor Affairs’ List of Goods Produced by Child Labor or Forced Labor, an annual report that names countries and industries where these labor violations are pervasive. The UN Office on Drugs and Crime publishes a trove of detailed reports, statistics, and other information covering drug crime, organized crime, trafficking, and other issues.
The International Labor Organization (ILO) publishes global standards, guides and Conventions regarding labor conditions and safety at sea, including the Work in Fishing Convention, 2007 (No. 188).
To see which vessels and companies have been blocked from entering the U.S. by the Customs and Border Protection Agency’s Withhold Release Order program, see this list. To find vessels and companies that have been sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, consult this database. It may be worth searching these troves of information to see if your target company, country, or industry is cited in any of these reports or databases.
What NGO Resources Can You Reference to Learn About Human Rights and Labor Concerns Tied to Seafood?
As with the governmental resources, these organizations do not solely focus on ocean crime, but their resources often tackle maritime issues and industries. The Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime runs a database that scores countries on multiple risk indicators on cross-border crime. Human Rights Watch publishes a multitude of reports that can hold valuable information; it can be helpful to search the organization’s database of reports by keyword. The International Justice Mission produces comprehensive investigative reports about slavery on fishing ships.
How Can You Find What Ships Are Licensed to Fish in Certain Waters?
To find out what ships are licensed or registered to fish in certain countries, you can check the website of the Fisheries Transparency Initiative (FITI). In 2024, the agency was working with Cape Verde, Madagascar, Seychelles, and Mauritania to produce yearly reports on their efforts to increase transparency around national fisheries. There is often a wealth of information in these reports that sometimes includes lists of vessels recently registered or licensed to fish in these countries. Another strategy you can try for finding a list of licensed fishing vessels in a certain country is to type the country’s name into Google along with some iteration of “Ministry of Fisheries and Marine Resources.” This will take you to the website of their fisheries agency, which sometimes offers this kind of information. The list may not be up to date for every country, but it can offer a snapshot of the vessels that have recently been fishing in national waters.
Regional Fisheries Management Organizations (RFMOS) also license fishing and fishing support vessels (fish carriers and fish bunkers which provide fuel to fishing vessels at sea), and publish their authorizations publicly. For more information, see below. The International Seafood Sustainability Foundation (ISSF) provides multiple databases which bring together current and historical identity as well as RFMO information for tuna fishing vessels.
What Organizations Impose Rules on Certain Waters?
Regional Fisheries Management Organizations (RFMOS) are international organizations that regulate fishing activities in certain regions on the high seas. They are responsible for establishing binding measures for the conservation and sustainable management of highly migratory fish species. They also maintain lists of vessels that have been authorized to engage in fishing within their jurisdiction.
You can find vessel lists held by RFMOs by Googling the relevant RFMO for the area you are investigating and then hunting around their website. Most offer their own searchable databases, but others you will have to download first. The main RFMOs include The Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources, or CCAMLR, which provides a list of authorized vessels by fishing season; The North Pacific Fisheries Commission, or NPFC, which provides a vessel registry; The South Pacific Regional Fisheries Management Organisation, or SPRFMO, which provides a public vessel record; The International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas, or ICCAT, which provides a public vessel record; The Indian Ocean Tuna Commission, or IOTC, which provides a searchable list of active vessels; The Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission, or WCPFC, which provides its vessel list; and The Inter-American Tropical Tuna Commission, or IATTC, where you can either access a full list of vessels or a sorted list by flag or type of gear.
There are also a few secondary RFMOs with smaller lists of authorized vessels. These RFMOs include The Northwest Atlantic Fisheries Organization, or NAFO, which provides a vessel registry; The Southeast Atlantic Fisheries Organization, or SEAFO, which provides an authorized vessel list; The General Fisheries Commission for the Mediterranean, or GFCM, which provides an authorized vessel list; and The Northeast Atlantic Fisheries Commission, or NEAFC, which provides a list of vessels. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development has published a potentially useful (though dated) overview and critique.
How Can a Researcher Get a Sense for Volume of Seafood Entering Countries and from Where?
It is often helpful to know how much seafood is imported to a country and from where. A useful tool is the International Fisheries Trade Permit Holders (IFTP) where you can search for “IFTP”, option will appear at the bottom to “Download All Current IFTPs”). The tariff schedules generally set out 10-digit codes used to identify goods when they are imported into a nation. Under the Harmonized Schedule, these codes are harmonized across countries through the six-digit level. For imports into the United States, goods are classified under the Harmonized Tariff Schedule of the United States (HTSUS) of which Chapters 3 and 16 cover seafood products for human consumption. Once a researcher has identified the appropriate ten-digit code for a seafood product under the HTSUS, Dataweb can be utilized to determine the volume and value of these imports from specific source countries. Dataweb can also be utilized to determine where these imports enter the United States, by asking for breakouts based on port of entry. Internationally, a researcher can get a sense of trade in the product between nations by using the UN ComTrade database, which reports volume and value figures on a six-digit “harmonized system” codes, for which there is typically one for virtually every product that is transacted internationally. Other useful tools for analyzing country to country trade flows based on HS code includes Trase, Resource Trade Earth, and Trade Map.
What Methods Exist for Checking Seafood for Blocked Imports or Other Problems?
On food entry refusals, these resources allow researchers to identify where there are discrete issues with seafood production and exports from particular countries and, for Japan and the United States, with particular exporters/processors. For example, the FDA has recently been refusing squid products for “added bulk” meaning that water has been added to the product to increase its weight. In addition to allowing a researcher to look into discrete problems that might characterize the seafood product of particular interest, a researcher can also develop a profile of an exporter in terms of whether it has a known and recorded history of violative shipments. Separately, the EU’s audit reports are thorough and provide good descriptions as to how a fishery in a particular country is regulated. Here is an example of an audit of India’s commercial fishery conducted in 2017. For the US, the tools to use are the FDA Import Alerts on Fishery/Seafood Products and the FDA Import Refusal Reports. For the EU, use the European Union’s Rapid Alert System for Food and Feed (RASFF) or the European Union’s Food and Veterinary Office’s Audit Reports. For Japan, there is Japan Imported Food Safety, including violations of Food Sanitation Act. For Australia there is the Australia Failing Foods Report.
What Tools Exist for Information About Seafood Companies?
To investigate U.S. seafood importers and find links to their buyers, there are several good-practice steps you can follow.
Import Genius, Panjiva, and Trade Atlas are paid tools that offer trade data that can be used for seeing what companies have imported and exported seafood, and when. ImportYeti offers the same type of information, but it is free. Import Genius can also track shipping containers; if you know the container number for a particular shipment, you can find out where it was shipped from and where it went. Open Supply Hub is another supply chain tracing database that sometimes offers information about the seafood trade. SOMO’s The Counter (paid) assists investigators by digging into both open-source and proprietary information about a company of interest.
The most important thing to do is to systematically document everything of any significance. Very small nuggets of information that you might be tempted to disregard at first glance may prove pivotal when combined with other information you learn later. This requires you to maintain an integrative mindset but also strive toward a tidy efficiency. This process will generally lead you down rabbit holes, so hunting through 68 open tabs for that one bit of information you saw 25 minutes ago is going to waste time and quickly overwhelm you. Documenting everything of significance, however, is also time-consuming, especially if you aren’t sure what is and isn’t significant. Therefore, it might be worth considering a Hunchly 30-day free trial. When activated, Hunchly will automatically log and save every website you view. OneTab will store the websites you visit for free.
When you begin your search, start by familiarizing yourself with the basic profile of the importing company. Establish the principal address of the company by looking it up on opencorporates.com, and compare this against the address listed in bills of lading. (If you are seeing multiple addresses, it might be worth searching importyeti.com for the company. Right at the bottom of the company profile page you’ll see a box called “Contacts, Other Addresses & Names.” This will list all addresses associated with this company on bills of lading stored on the database). For more corporate data, consult with this list of official business registers and country by country databases collected by Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (you can also find more country specific company registries via this Bellingcat resource on the “companies and finance” tab). Another useful tool for the purpose of establishing the family tree of companies and connecting parent companies with their subsidiaries is Mergent Intellect, a fee-based database often accessible through universities and public libraries. Sometimes it has the name of the executives and other key board members as well.
Take note of any trademark registrations that opencorporates.com associates with the company. (These will be listed at the bottom of the company’s profile page.) These will generally relate to the brands under which the company sells seafood. For foreign companies, Open Corporates also provides links back to the source country’s business database, which may offer more information about the business or individuals who work there.
See whether the SeafoodSource supplier directory has a basic description of the company. There are other supplier directories for seafood, but most U.S. importers will be on SeafoodSource (which convenes various global industry-networking events). For smaller companies, you’ll typically get their SeafoodSource profile just from a Google search rather than having to search in SeafoodSource specifically. Other directories (such as Bloomberg) may have profiles of medium to larger companies.
Try to find the company’s website. They may not necessarily have one, but if they do, this is usually the most important source of intelligence and requires careful review (check dead links on WayBack Machine). Most importer websites will be relatively basic and you can review every page within 15-20 minutes. However, some importers might be large corporations, and you will have to be more selective. You can use Wget to download an entire website. This can be useful for the purposes of searching all the content in an easier fashion and ensuring that you have the information at your ease of disposal later on if the organization or company decides to remove it. In particular, this plugin might come in handy for an investigator seeking to check documents that have been published online by a company or organization such as newsletters, product brochures, online articles, press releases, or annual reports. By entering a URL into Domain Tools, you can also sometimes determine who owns the company’s website.
The most important pages you will find on a company website are an “Our Customers” page, where the company may list all or some of their buyers, or an “About Us” page, which will help clarify the company’s profile, in particular giving you a sense of what species of seafood they typically import and sell. The “About” page may tell you that the company is a subsidiary of another entity, and in some (rare) cases this might be all you need to know. It may also reveal brands under which the company sells its products. The “Our Products” page will sometimes appear in the form of a brochure that needs to be downloaded. It can tell you (1) what types of seafood they sell, in what form and from which country or region, and (2) the names of the company’s seafood brands. It is also worth checking for eco labels on the packaging. All products certified by the Marine Stewardship Council, for example, need to have barcodes on their packaging for traceability, which also provides vessel lists (although these lists can be misleading).
Perform a search for the company on LinkedIn. The company may have its own page on LinkedIn (this can also help provide a general profile of them). If they do, navigate to the People tab of their profile page and review all employee job titles. Otherwise, look at the People results tab on LinkedIn search to identify people who are listing the target company as their employer. Searching for people who formerly worked at a company is a great way to find sources who will talk to you about their former employer or may even be a whistleblower.
If you are looking for information on products sold by the company or their customers, open up the profiles of anyone working in the sales department or similar. For each individual profile, take a look at their recent posts. Have they posted anything about who their company supplies? Have any other companies left comments on posts they’ve made? These can be useful indications. It is often smart to view target profiles using LinkedIn’s full anonymity function. Since the website typically informs users who have checked their profile, this function avoids a journalist revealing that they are looking into a particular company or source. (Beyond searching for information on importers, LinkedIn is also a good resource for looking into manning agencies that recruit fishermen.) Some companies will maintain Facebook and Instagram profiles on which they will post marketing materials. It is worth taking a look at the timeline of any Facebook profile, especially images that might show brands sold by the company or outlets that stock their products.
It is often useful to also review Google Image search results in conjunction with the All tab results, especially if you have already seen the product packaging. This can help you visually identify outlets that are selling target brands. Running a reverse image search can help you home in on the original source for an image. To run a reverse image search using Google Images, you can either upload an image file from your computer or enter a website URL or image link into the search bar. Google Images will return matching images from elsewhere on the web. It can also be worth running a reverse image search using a mirror image of your search target, in case it was edited by subsequent uploaders.
You will want to aim to review every single hit Google brings up. Do not disregard something as insignificant because it is on page 14 of the Google results. For the sake of efficiency, this typically means trawling through tens of pages of search results and exercising your own judgment on what is and is not a useful page to open up and examine.
How Can You Find the Names of Companies Importing Seafood into the US?
Prior to the Seafood Import Monitoring Program (SIMP) implemented by NOAA Fisheries there was no public disclosure of who is acting as importers of seafood in the United States. Bills of lading list consignees, but these can be logistics companies or banks (or the exporter). Under SIMP, every importer of a seafood species covered by the program must obtain an International Fisheries Trade Permit. NOAA Fisheries’ database of IFTP holders gives a researcher the total universe of U.S. entities, with address information, that may be acting as the importer for seafood of interest into the United States. This only works for seafood products covered by SIMP, but it is a useful tool, particularly when looking into shell/paper companies.
How Can You Find Contact Information for Potential Sources?
RocketReach is a highly effective service for finding contact information, including personal emails and phone numbers. To return the most accurate results, paste the URL to your source’s LinkedIn page and hit search. Pipl is an effective paid tool for finding contact information. Through PimEyes (paid) or by using TinEye or Yandex image search, which are free, you can upload a picture of someone’s face to find any other photo of them across the internet.
How Can You Find Information from Academic Research?
If you are looking for an academic paper, Google Scholar and ResearchGate are a good place to start, although not all the papers will be open access. You may be able to find the closed papers through a database on your local library’s website, or through a university library if you have access to one. Sci Hub provides many paywalled academic articles. The Internet Archive has many free books that you can “borrow” and view digitally. Project Gutenberg also has several books archived that you can view for free.
What Are Useful Databases That Aggregate News Articles Not Always Available on Google?
LexisNexis and Factiva (paid) are useful places to start for finding news articles from a certain amount of time that are relevant to your research. If you are hunting for a specific article, you can put its headline into a LexisNexis search with the prompt, Head(“words”), or put the first sentence of the text into the prompt, Hlead(“words”).
Are There Alternate Ways to Access News or Academic Articles That Can’t Simply Be Googled?
You may be able to access sites such as the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal by logging into your local library site and using ProQuest newspapers. Many articles on major news sites are archived on the Wayback Machine. Insert a URL to search it, then click on any save that pops up. It should open with the full text, then you can download a PDF to save locally. The Wayback Machine also has a tool that enables you to save websites, which is useful if you are worried that information may disappear. You can try archive.today if the WayBack Machine doesn’t have the site you are looking for indexed. You can also try the website Remove Paywall which will provide you with multiple resources to access an article if you have the URL.
How Did The Outlaw Ocean Project Conduct Its Investigations?
For major projects, we normally provide a methodology page where we explain our approach. For example, see our methodologies for the India investigation, China investigation, and Libya investigation.