Web/News Search
Ferretly will perform a web/news search when it runs a social media background check if you chose to include web/news in your settings/report profile.
Ferretly will perform a surface web scan across billions of indexed sites for matches for your subject. In addition to news sites, we include hundreds of alternative media sites, including niche social media, blogs, boards, forums, review sites, and more.
In general, it will use your subject's full name, college, employer, and location when performing the search and return the top 30 most relevant articles. Ferretly uses AI and natural language processing to analyze each web article to discover identifiers and attempts to match against subject properties. Ferretly automatically handles transliteration, identifies nicknames, and uses semantic similarity when matching on name, company, and college. Depending upon the makeup and number of matches, Ferretly will classify each article as either High, Medium, or Low confidence.
The following identifiers are used in the confidence algorithm. Name, email, profile picture/image, social media profile, location, phone, alias, age/DOB, company, college and high school.
You can also include keywords in your web/news search by clicking the web icon indicator in keyword settings for the keywords you want to include.
Ferretly will perform multiple search iterations using name combinations, name and employer, name and location, etc., e.g., if your subject has a first, middle, and last name, then Ferretly will include the full name along with the alternate first and last name combinations in the search string. Similarly, Ferretly will include any alias names you included in the Alias subject property when you entered your subject.
For more information on web/news see Frequently Asked Questions.