Whether trying to verify people in a photo or video or finding the contact information of a source, one of the primary goals of open source reporting is tracing and identifying people. There are many tools for this ranging from facial recognition searches to social media handle finders.

Sometimes a simple Google Lens reverse image search is sufficient for the task. However, one of the most powerful and effective facial recognition searches is called PimEyes. All the user has to do is upload a photo where a person's face is visible, and PimEyes will search the open web to find any and every page where that face appears.

This can be especially useful when trying to identify or verify an individual in a video or photo uploaded to social media. The subjects could be criminals, human rights abusers or even spies, such as Russian FSB agents, who might be spotted at a family gathering on a relative's Facebook page despite staying off public networks themselves.

Lenso.ai is another multi-factor search engine that also runs facial recognition, along with searching for copyright and places.

There are also publicly available search tools that focus on social media. Instantusername.com allows the user to check the availability of a username across multiple platforms, which often allows for cross-platform verification of someone's identity and social media presence. This can be useful for finding multiple ways to contact or verify a source.

Epieos.com works with both emails and phone numbers. By inputting an email, users can find whether an email was involved in any data leaks, is linked to a google account, or if they left any reviews on google maps, which can help to verify someone's location. Users can also input a phone number to find similar information.

There are many tools that work specifically with Facebook. Whopostedwhat.com allows users to search for posts on the platform with specific keywords, dates, and locations. The website also works with Instagram, but can only search for posts from dates that are tagged with their location.

These tools get around the search engines on social media websites that make it difficult to find certain posts. Graph.tips works similarly, allowing users to search Facebook for posts, people, photos, pages, places, videos and events by location, date, and associated users. Intelligence X also allows users to search social media sites by full name, phone number, email, image, and even IP address.