Open Source Intelligence Tools

Use it to cross-check results from other search engines, locate public pages with less personalization, and quickly summarize a research topic before opening and preserving the underlying sources.

Useful for general web discovery, alternate search results, and investigative searches where you do not want prior search history heavily shaping the results.

Use it when a normal search engine is not producing enough results or when you want to broaden the search quickly without repeating the same query across multiple sites.

A strong investigator launchpad when you know what type of information you need but do not know the best search service or query path to use.

Use it as a quick toolbox when you need to pivot between identifiers such as domains, IP addresses, email addresses, hashes, URLs, or other technical artifacts. Individual linked services may have separate access rules.

Useful after an incident or event to look for public posts made near a store, roadway, venue, or other location and identify potential witnesses, subjects, vehicles, or additional context.

Helpful for finding organizations, journalists, brands, agencies, and individuals whose Bluesky identity is connected to a recognizable website domain.

Use it to locate publicly advertised Discord communities that may be relevant to a subject, alias, resale activity, fraud type, product, or investigative topic.

Useful for pivoting from a known username or alias to possible profiles on other websites. Common usernames can create false positives, so identity should be corroborated with additional identifiers.

Useful for developing public-record leads on a person, identifying possible residences or family connections, and generating additional identifiers to verify through authoritative sources.

Use it to identify the likely carrier or numbering region associated with a phone number and to understand the number's original numbering context. Number portability means the result should not be treated as proof of current carrier or location.

Useful for advanced geospatial work involving cellular infrastructure, tower locations, network identifiers, and radio context. It is not a phone-number tracking service and is best suited to investigators comfortable with GIS or structured data.

The free lookup functions can help develop a VIN or vehicle description from available plate information in supported jurisdictions, or decode a known VIN so investigators can use that identifier in other authorized records systems.

Useful for locating possible resale activity, identifying sellers, searching unusual product combinations, reviewing completed or sold listings, and documenting marketplace patterns relevant to an ORC or fraud investigation.

Useful when an investigator has a worksheet of UPCs from theft events, seizures, listings, or inventories and needs to quickly identify the associated products without researching each code individually.

Very useful for pre-surveillance planning, reviewing approaches and exits, identifying nearby landmarks, understanding parking and roadway layout, and briefing investigators before field activity.

Useful for visualizing large lists of theft events, subject addresses, store locations, vehicle sightings, meeting locations, or other points to identify geographic clusters and travel patterns.

Useful for checking roadway conditions and visual context near an incident, travel route, store, or investigative location, and for identifying traffic-camera sources that may warrant timely preservation or follow-up.

Useful for investigating scam sites, resale websites, phishing domains, or other online infrastructure by reviewing registration dates, registrars, nameservers, and available registrant information, then pivoting those identifiers into additional searches.

Useful when an image may contain hidden or embedded information, unusual layers, metadata, or other artifacts that are not visible during ordinary viewing. Avoid uploading sensitive evidence unless external processing is permitted.

Useful for rapidly reviewing the metadata contained in an image or file to identify dates, device information, possible GPS coordinates, software history, or other leads. Metadata can be removed or altered and should always be corroborated.

Useful for finding spoken references to names, usernames, stores, products, locations, organizations, or phrases inside lengthy public YouTube videos without manually watching every video first.

Useful for quickly developing search paths, summarizing unfamiliar topics, generating alternate query terms, and identifying source pages for manual review and verification.

Useful for triaging long public videos and identifying sections that may deserve manual review. Important statements should always be verified directly against the source video and timestamp.

May be useful for authorized training, testing, demonstrations, or approved investigative personas where using a real person's photograph would be inappropriate. Use only when permitted by organizational policy, law, and the rules of the platform involved.

Useful for investigators who want structured training in open-source research methods and a stronger foundation before using specialized OSINT tools in casework.

For authorized investigative purposes, the receipt-retrieval function may help confirm or document rental activity when the investigator is lawfully permitted to use the required identifying information.

For authorized investigative purposes, the receipt-retrieval function may help confirm or document rental activity when the investigator is lawfully permitted to use the required identifying information.

Useful to authorized investigators preparing lawful process for telephone or carrier records and determining the correct provider or legal-process pathway. Access depends on an authorized Hawk Analytics account.