Have you ever stopped to consider the vast amount of information available on the internet? Have you ever stopped to consider what information there is about you on the internet? With a little bit of digging, someone can probably find a plethora of personal and professional information about you if they know how to properly research using the internet. If you have not taken the time to do the research yourself about what someone can find about you on the internet, it is probably time to do this.

With a little bit of effort and time, someone can easily search you on the internet. Keep reading to learn about the best identity resolution software and tactics to find, collect and assess the information on the internet that relates to you personally or professionally.

When we think about how much information and data exists on the internet, it is impossible to actually grasp how much actually exists. It turns out statistics actually show how limited we are in our understanding of and collection of the available information on the internet. For instance, only 1 percent of data currently existing online is ever analyzed, according to the International Data Corporation. That means 99 percent of what exists on the internet has never been thoroughly examined.

One way to go about finding and examining this data is through text mining, text analytics, entity analytics, and social media data analysis.

So, what is text mining and why is it a good starting place when trying to find data on the internet about a company or about yourself?

Text mining is a way to get at the data that exists on the internet that has yet to be analyzed or used to anyone?s advantage. There are four main steps to text mining that include retrieving information, processing natural language, extracting the information and mining the data. Once you have properly mined the information, you can then use it to your benefit.

This can be done on social media, as well. For example, the number of active social media users throughout the world is constantly increasing. In 2016, there were around 2.34 billion active users around the world. By 2018, it is thought that the number will increase to 2.67 billion users. On Facebook alone, every second of every day there are active users creating information. As of now, there are around 1.97 billion users. For Twitter, it is a similar story. Right now, there are around 319 million users around the world who are active every month. So, given the increasingly large number of people using various social media platforms, it shows just how much data is being created every second of every minute of every hour of every day. With social media platforms gaining more and more popularity every year, there is no reason to expect a decrease in the amount of users who are active or the amount of data that is created across these social media tools any time soon.

So, how does this affect you and your identity?

Well, whether you are a social media user, you work for a company that has an online portfolio or you simply have data that exists about you on the internet, you want to locate and analyze this information before someone else does. Using identity resolution software is similar to using entity resolution software. The purpose of this would be to make sure data that exists for a certain entity is all located. Some of the main things involved in entity and identity resolution software are dealing with issues of deduplication, record linkage and canonicalization.

By using such software, you can help to find and link any information that exists regarding you personally or professionally across all the different data sets on the internet. Have you ever tried to research yourself on the internet? Did you find that using identity resolution software could be beneficial to you? Let us know in the comments about your experience.