The Target Oriented Network Intelligence Collection (TONIC) problem is the problem of finding profiles in a social network that contain publicly available information about a given target profile via automated crawling. Such profiles are called leads. Leads can be found by crawling the network using the profiles' friend lists (immediate neighborhood) in order to decide which profile will be crawled next. Assuming that leads tend to cluster together, prior work limited the search for new leads only to immediate neighbors of the leads previously found. In this paper we relax this limitation, and extend the scope of the search to a wider neighborhood, including the possibility of crawling to non-leads, i.e., profiles that have no publicly available information about the target. We propose a set of heuristics that guide this search. Experimental results show that with the new setting more leads can be found and leads are found faster. In addition, we perform a cost benefit analysis of the search, weighing the reward of finding leads with the costs of the search.

In this paper we introduce the Target Oriented Network Intelligence Collection (TONIC) problem, which is the problem of finding profiles in a social network that contain information about a given target via automated crawling. We formalize TONIC as a search problem and a best-first approach is proposed for solving it.Several heuristics are presented to guide this search.These heuristics are based on the topology of the currently known part of the social network.The efficiency of the proposed heuristics and the effect of the graph topology on their performance is experimentally evaluated on the Google+ social network.