Search, Image, and Location

PORP · 50 questions

• A procurement analyst needs PDF copies of a paving vendor's old city contracts that still live on the finance site. Staff have been scrolling HTML pages one by one. Which search approach should the analyst use first?
• The city clerk wants mentions of a sidewalk contractor limited to the city's own website, not random blogs. Which search technique should the analyst apply?
• Parks staff search a mural artist's slogan and keep getting song lyrics instead of the commission. Why should they switch to a quoted-phrase search?
• A 311 team searching for dumping also wants illegal fill, but not the city's recycling FAQ. Which operator combination should they apply?
• Transit marketing rebranded a bus-lane project, but old PDFs still use the prior name. What should the analyst do when searching for public records?
• Housing authority staff conclude a property manager has no public footprint after glancing at the first page of generic results. What should the OSINT analyst do before accepting that claim?
• The county assessor wants spreadsheets of comparable sales that were posted as attachments on the assessor site. Which search approach best finds those civic attachments?
• A stormwater report vanished from the live public-works site after a CMS redesign and now returns 404. What should the analyst try next?
• Economic development needs only the last month of public results about a factory-relocation rumor. Why apply a time-bounded search?
• Public works needs hits on a unique invoice number that looks like a serial. How should the analyst query it?
• Library IT wants to know whether an abandoned departmental microsite still exposes public directory listings of PDFs. Which fundamentals-level OSINT step is appropriate?
• The port authority searches a vessel name that is also a common English word and gets thousands of unrelated hits. What should the analyst add?
• Elections staff search a candidate's name and keep hitting a different person in another county. How should they disambiguate?
• A fire-prevention educator needs slide decks the department posted years ago as PowerPoint files. Why should the search not be limited to PDF?
• Code enforcement googles a complaint address in natural language and misses the GIS parcel page that uses a formatted APN. What should the analyst search?
• The open-data officer asks why two search engines return different hits for the same site-restricted query. How should the analyst explain it?
• A convention-bureau analyst treats search-autocomplete suggestions as confirmed downtown venue names. What is the correct handling?
• Parks posts a new-playground photo that a resident claims is actually another city's park. What should the analyst do before reprinting the claim?
• A vendor's 'our crew on your street' photo reverse-matches a stock-photo library. How should procurement treat that result?
• 311 receives a dumped-mattress photo. Reverse image search shows the same photo on a marketplace listing from last year. What should the analyst conclude?
• Historic preservation has a facade photo with no EXIF because it came from Instagram. What should the analyst assume?
• Building inspection receives an original JPEG from a resident's camera that still has GPS EXIF. How should they use those coordinates?
• A tourism photo's EXIF timestamp is midnight UTC while the caption says sunset concert. How should the analyst treat the camera clock?
• Fleet staff reverse-search a damaged-city-truck photo and get many near-duplicates from news sites. What should they look for to support a timeline?
• Public-health permit photos of a kitchen were clearly screenshots, with status bar and app chrome visible. What does the file's EXIF describe?
• A housing-authority flyer uses a tightly cropped photo of a building facade. Public copies of the same shot, uncropped, show a different building in the background. What is the better reverse-image input?
• The marina office recovers a boat photo whose EXIF lists camera make and model but no GPS. How should the analyst treat those device tags?
• Sister-city staff reverse-search a logo that is a variant of the municipal seal and get hits on letterhead, proclamations, and other official stationery. What does that result mean?
• Snow-operations posts a plow photo whose EXIF includes an “edited with” software tag. What is the professional next step?
• Animal control reverse-searches a “found dog” photo used in a local appeal and finds the same image on a rescue listing in another state. What should the analyst conclude?
• Open-data staff strip EXIF from published street photos as a privacy policy. An analyst later cannot recover GPS from the portal copy. What should the analyst recognize?
• A resident sends a messaging-app-compressed photo of alleged curb damage. EXIF is gone and reverse-image results are thin. What should the analyst do?
• The convention bureau’s hero image reverse-matches a photographer’s portfolio labeled as another city. What should staff do before reprinting it?
• Code enforcement wants to run a blurry license plate through a generative upscaler and treat the invented characters as EXIF-quality fact. What should the analyst do?
• A dumped-debris photo shows a unique water tower painted with a high-school mascot. How should the analyst geolocate the dump site?
• Transit receives a bus-shelter vandalism photo showing a route number and a unique mural. What is the strongest public location path?
• Parks needs a lakeside-dock photo geolocated. Vegetation and a dam shape appear to match only one reservoir on the city’s map. What method should the analyst use?
• A 311 photo shows long, east-facing shadows while the complainant says it was “noon at City Hall.” How should the analyst use that lighting?
• Street-sign text in a photo names a block that city GIS shows as one-way opposite to the claimed direction of travel. What should the analyst do?
• The municipal airport authority is shown a photo claimed to be “our terminal,” but the jet-bridge paint scheme belongs to another region. What is the right location path?
• Public-works hydrant colors follow a known city code. A photo’s hydrant-cap color does not match that block’s GIS record. How should the analyst treat the mismatch?
• A photo labeled “downtown” shows shop-sign language that does not appear in the city’s business-license records. What should the analyst infer?
• Emergency management wants to geolocate a flooded underpass from a dashboard-camera still. A mile marker and a unique overpass mural are visible. What should the analyst do first?
• Library events staff try to geolocate a stolen-banner photo using Street View-class imagery that is three years old. A new building in the photo is missing on that layer. What should they remember?
• Zoning staff are shown a “vacant lot” photo in which power-pole inventory numbers are readable. What location method should they try?
• A resident claims a pothole photo is “on Main Street.” The storefront skyline matches a county road two towns over. What should public works do before dispatching a crew?
• The port’s public-facing OSINT cell has a photo of a crane with a unique ID painted on the boom. What should the analyst search?
• Parks is geolocating a trail photo that shows a trail-marker code listed in the city’s trail-map PDF. What should the analyst use?
• A weather-alert screenshot includes a National Weather Service zone and a radar thumbnail. How should the analyst use those public products?
• Reverse image, EXIF, and landmark checks disagree, and the PIO wants to publish a location anyway. What is the professional product?