Insights
Why Google Search Is Failing You — And What You Can Do About It
In celebration of Neon Century’s eleventh birthday this year, and as I reach two decades in the intelligence sector – this month felt the right time to share some important lessons I’ve picked up along the way.
Whether you’re a billionaire, business executive at the end of your career, or a junior analyst at the start of your career, I hope these are valuable as we all navigate the world’s most hostile operating environment – the digital now.
1. The Internet is Mostly Invisible; And It’s Holding You Back
Unless you work in the data center business, or lay undersea cables, most of us have no idea how big the internet is getting. Unless we visualize this, there’s no way of imagining the potential riches online. We still use keyboards, mice and screens like we did in the 1980s. Yet the digital, invisible world behind the screen is growing exponentially.
In 2011, the then Head of Security at Twitter, Del Harvey gave a remarkable TED Talk about the fact that there are five hundred million tweets per day. And so; a one in a million event happens five hundred times a day on Twitter.
One in a billion events are an hourly occurrence on the web.
Once you can begin to imagine the size of the internet, you can imagine its potential riches. Firms like Neon exist to get it for you. This video is still the best I’ve seen at contextualizing the size of the web in a couple of minutes.
2. Google is not the Internet
Four percent.
When you search Google, that’s all you are seeing of the whole internet. This is the first stat I bring up in each client meeting and in most cases, jaws drop.
The rest of the internet, which is trillions of pages, is out there on the deep web, most of it not indexed by search engines.
Knowing where to look is as vital today as what to look at. Because if you are advising clients, investing in companies and or making million dollar investment decisions on the back of Google results, it’s like looking for a comet in the night sky with a pair of binoculars.
3. Online, Everything is True
As the open source revolution raced ahead at quantum speed in the early part of the 2010s, for me, something became incredibly clear: with so much data out there, you could argue that everything is true.
One source claims a market is collapsing, another sees it booming. Which is correct? Likely both. Short-sellers can create factual dossiers to crash a company’s share price, but markets often fail to appreciate that every business in the world has thousands of good and bad facts out there online.
For executives, this has profound implications. Intelligence is not about truth in the absolute; it’s about strategic interpretation. You don’t need certainty—you need confidence supported by layered context.
The coming age AI will make even more information available to more people, more quickly. The question is: who acts on it first?
4. There’s a Tool for That
The democratization of intelligence tools is both a gift and a trap. There are tens of thousands of tools out there. Need a tool that reveals land ownership records in Hungary? Check. Need a tool that tracks oceanic oil spills in real time? Check. Need a tool that tracks political donors in Brazil? Check.
Tools are only as good as the hands that wield them. Take any abundant material – rock, metal, water, wood, or data. You need craft to turn that material into something of value. At Neon we have seen free tools outperform $100,000 systems simply because of analyst competence and contextual understanding.
Tooling is not the solution—it’s the enabler. Businesses investing in OSINT should focus less on tech stacks and more on analytical fluency. For OSINT analysts: don’t fall in love with platforms. Learn how data behaves. Learn what good looks like. And learn when to ignore get off the boxed up platforms and go manual.
5. Data Dumps are not Intelligence Reports
Too often, intel businesses mistake volume for value. So often in the intelligence industry, I see other firms send over a 100-page export from a social monitoring platform. This is not intelligence. It’s at best evidence—potentially useful, but meaningless without interpretation. Intelligence is what happens after judgment, synthesis, and context are applied.
Clients need clarity. Intelligence reporting is storytelling for decision-makers. For analysts, this means mastering narrative construction, relevance filtering, and visual communication. And for business leaders, it means demanding more than long reports—ask for actionable insights, patterns, and implications.
6. Governments and Big Corporates: Stuck In A Bygone Era?
The relationship between corporations, intelligence agencies, and private intelligence firms reveals some notable patterns. Many large companies recruit retired intelligence professionals as prestigious trophy assets, which can foster corporate leadership’s interest in old school spying intelligence operations that may be unnecessarily complex.
Traditional strategic advisory firms often appeal to executives by making them feel they’re ‘C’ or Jack Reacher, leading to substantial and often misguided investments in indirect intelligence work against competitors.
However, open source intelligence matches or often exceed traditional human-source intelligence for most corporate needs. Government agencies are recognizing this potential, with dedicated OSINT capabilities expanding across Western intelligence communities.
Challenges remain: institutional knowledge suffers from frequent personnel rotations, and decision-makers are often influenced by large consulting firms promoting solutions that are woefully out of date for the 2020s. Is it time for DOGE for the IC?
7. Tree Surgeons
The main challenge with the OSINT industry is that because a) everyone is an internet user and b) is used to finding out information for free via tools like Google and ChatGPT, they are hesitant to spend money with true professionals, or see how it would add value.
To this I offer one analogy. You or I could decide to cut down a tree in my garden this weekend. We could buy the tools we need, spend our own time on it, watch some how-to videos and technically do it for free. However, as any tree surgeon will tell you, there are a myraid of dangers to cutting down trees, and that its probably a lot cheaper and more efficient to pay someone to do it. Chances are you’ll keep your limbs and your house intact.
8. Financial Markets and OSINT – It Truly is a Billion Dollar Game
Hedge funds, short sellers private equity firms, and modern law firms have already integrated OSINT into their decision-making frameworks. Why? Because information asymmetry is value. If you can detect early indicators—supply chain disruptions, regulatory murmurs, executive relocations—you gain seconds, minutes, or days of advantage. And in financial markets, that means billions.
The problem is speed and trust. OSINT offers the former in spades; the latter depends on the analyst and their methods. For boardrooms, the takeaway is clear: OSINT is not niche. It is not optional. It is a competitive edge. And ignoring it means leaving opportunity (and advantage) on the table.
9. What Makes a Good OSINT Analyst?
The best OSINT analysts I’ve worked with aren’t the loudest or most technical. They’re the curious, the disciplined, the context-driven. They ask “why?” five times more than anyone else. They don’t chase the obvious—they look for outliers, contradictions, and second-order consequences.
What they possess—above all—is judgment. The ability to filter signal from noise, to understand relevance, and to communicate insight without overstatement. To young analysts: develop your geopolitical literacy, your pattern recognition, and your skepticism. The tools will change. Your judgment is what lasts.
10. The Graveyard of Old Tools
The OSINT ecosystem is in constant flux. What worked a year ago is now broken, blocked, or obsolete. APIs close, platforms shift policies, and scrapers get burned. This is not failure—it’s the natural rhythm of open-source intelligence.
Don’t wed your process to a single platform. Build modular stacks. At Neon, we have tried to build human capital that evolves with the environment. For analysts, keep your toolsets lean, stay in community with others, and always have a plan B. What matters is not what you use, but what you see—and how quickly you can adjust your lens.
Summary: OSINT is the Future of Strategic Insight
The open-source intelligence revolution is not on the horizon—it’s here.
For boardrooms, this is both an opportunity and an obligation to your shareholders. You now have the means to see, predict, and act with clarity once reserved for state actors. But with that comes responsibility: to invest wisely, demand rigor, and foster analysts who think, not just collect. OSINT is your lens—use it to see what others miss. The invisible, the complex, the inconvenient—that’s where the advantage lives.
For analysts: you are working a field that rewards discipline and imagination in equal measure. Know that you are sometimes the bearer of hard truths. Be firm, be ethical, and back your findings. And if you need a mentor, do reach out.
Cameron