MAIGRET: SHERLOCK WITH A BIGGER ROLODEX
Run a broader username search, read recursive pivots carefully, and treat every FOUND as a lead until you open it yourself.
EST_TIME: 35 MIN
PHASES: 5
Same doorbell, more doors, more notes
Maigret is a username checker in the same family as Sherlock. You give it a handle. It asks a large pile of sites whether a profile page for that handle seems to exist. Where it pulls ahead is coverage and the notes it tries to take: more site rules, an attempt to read public fields off pages that actually load, and optional recursion that follows other usernames mentioned on those pages.
It still does not know who someone is. A Maigret report is a pile of URLs that passed a rule, plus whatever public text the parser managed to lift. If Sherlock is a clipboard of doorbell results, Maigret is the same clipboard after someone emptied a filing cabinet onto it. The filing cabinet is not a biography. Length is not corroboration. Maigret will happily write you a long report about a username shared by a plumber, a bot, and you.
How it differs from Sherlock
- The default site list is much larger. The Consensus snapshot this course used put Maigret in the thousands of sites, against a few hundred for Sherlock. Do not paste either number into a client report. Corpora move. The project's current README is the figure you are allowed to quote.
- It tries to extract display names, bios, and linked accounts when a page loads as a profile rather than as a wall.
- It can recurse. A found profile mentions another handle, and a later run may check that handle too. That second handle is a new lead, not a proven alias.
- It is heavier and slower. More requests from your IP means more rate limits, more challenge pages, and more rows that mean "the site got annoyed" rather than "no account".
Maigret is MIT-licensed. Using it yourself to learn the workflow is the point of this lesson. If you later ship a modified copy, read the licence before you do; this course does not turn you into the distributor.
Where it sits in OSINT101
Maigret is one of the twelve tools in this course. Do the Sherlock lesson first. That one teaches the only habit that survives contact with a big report: open the URL, score the hit, and refuse to marry a stranger who shares the handle. Use Maigret when you want wider coverage and you can sit with the extra noise. The target is still your own handle, or a test persona you created.
If you do not have a persona yet, make one before you install anything. Pick a handle unlikely to exist, such as pip_tadwell_osint101. Register it yourself on two or three free sites (a code host and a forum is enough) using an email address you control. You now know which accounts are real, because you opened them. That is ground truth. A tool does not get to overrule it.
What you are not doing
You are not building a dossier on a neighbour, an ex, a classmate, or anyone else who did not ask. You are not turning recursion on and going to make tea. You are not treating a parsed "full name" field as an identity document. Parsed fields are text the tool found on a page. Login walls, cookie banners, and "user not found" templates all contain text. Parsers are not fussy about which text they found.
Maigret finds more doors. You still have to walk through them and decide whether the same person lives behind each one.