Etools

Etools (etools.ch) is a Swiss metasearch engine that queries multiple search engines simultaneously — including Google, Bing, Yahoo, Yandex, and others — and aggregates, deduplicates, and presents the combined results in a single ranked list. It emphasizes neutrality, privacy, and European search coverage.

For OSINT investigators, Etools provides several advantages over single-engine search. Its metasearch approach increases result coverage — content indexed by some search engines but not others becomes accessible through the aggregated result set. Swiss privacy standards mean less behavioral tracking than major commercial engines.

The European perspective in Etools' result aggregation makes it particularly useful for investigations with European subjects or companies. Yandex inclusion provides coverage of Russian and Eastern European content that Western search engines may index less comprehensively. The varied international engine coverage helps surface country-specific search results that may be relevant when investigating international subjects.

Etools' result deduplication and ranking across multiple engine outputs provides a more comprehensive picture of the most consistently-indexed content for any query — pages that appear in multiple engines' top results are likely to be more relevant and more widely indexed than pages that appear in only one engine's results.

For privacy-sensitive OSINT research, Etools' Swiss jurisdiction and stated no-logging policy provide operational security advantages over engines that maintain detailed query logs linked to identifying information.

The tool supports standard search operators that function across the aggregated engines, and users can adjust which source engines contribute to results based on investigation requirements.

Etools is particularly effective as a complement to specialized search tools in an OSINT workflow — general web content is covered by the aggregated engines, while specialized OSINT platforms (Shodan, IntelX, Censys) provide technical infrastructure data that standard search engines do not index.

Document all Etools queries, including the search terms used and result sets reviewed, with timestamps for investigation records.