Find things out

The purpose of this page is to provide tips for people investigating things. These tips are given in no particular order.

Please contact me if you have any suggestions for additions to this list.

1. Look at a company website
Often, if you are investigating a company or other organisation it is worth beginning your investigation by finding the company/organisation’s own website. It is important to be sceptical and not accept anything at face value. It is worth making a note of any contact details you find. It is worth looking at the sitemap if there is one.

2. Find out who created a website

You can usually find out who has registered a website by using domaintools.com, whois.net or a similar service (Google: whois) For example, if you wanted to know who registered shopping.com: http://whois.domaintools.com/shopping.com.

3. Search within a company website

Use an inurl search on Google to search within a company website e.g. to search for “offer” on the tescom.com website type the following in to Google:inurl:tesco.com offer

4. Use Wikipedia

Try to find relevant articles on Wikipedia. Remember it is a user edited encyclopedia so there is the possibility for biased edits and other unreliable information. Research suggests it is no less reliable than printed encyclopedias but all sources should be treated with some scepticism. Use the “See also” section at the bottom of many articles to find more related articles. Use the “References” section that appears at the bottom of most articles to find sources outside of Wikipedia which should be enough to verify the main claims made in the article. Non-English language versions of Wikipedia contain more information on a given topic that English Wikipedia. You can access these using the menu on the left hand side of the page.

5. Extract contact details from the source of a webform
Sometimes you might not find a contact email address on a website even though there is a contact webform. Often there will be an email address in the source code of the webpage containing the webform. See also Wikihow:View Sourc Code