use by investigators

I posted this under the DevonThink forum and maybe I should have put it here. Sorry for any cross-posting.

I’m interested in seeing if this product will help me on my job. Generally I do a lot of internet searches. These searches take me a lot of time and I would like to find a system that will make things faster for me but at the same time I need it to be particularly thorough and in-depth.

I search for information related to people that clients hire me to find out about. Usually this is just an individual but occasionally I have to research a business.

This requires that I search for any reference that I can find about a person. Web information like full names, ages, addresses, phone numbers, family members, type businesses, their postings to blogs, their arrests records, property purchased or property owned, etc, etc. You could put all this into the category of “I need to know everything possible about this person, regardless of what it is or where it came from.” I don’t have a problem if my searches include information about someone that isn’t confirmed. I have to validate all information anyway. I need a system that will give me every possible indication about someone.

I spend hours looking through the different search engines and different online (public) sources. It would same me a tremendous amount of time if I could do one single search to do it all. Particularly if I could add new search engines/browsers when they come out.

Any thoughts or suggestions on how this product would apply and how I could use it to the best benefit would be GREATLY appreciated.

The most important advantage of DEVONagent in this case is probably that it can access multiple search engines concurrently, combine the results, follow “promising” links, filter duplicates & error pages and on demand even similar pages. At the same time these steps can both broaden (by following) and narrow (by filtering) your results.

The visualizer could be useful too as it might suggest related words you didn’t think of.