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Border & Immigration

Using Google To Track Mexican Drug Cartels

By John Rosman / Digital Editor, KPBS
Published November 2, 2012 at 6:35 AM PDT
This story was published more than 12 years ago.
MOGO

Two Harvard graduate students have written an algorithm that tracks the growth of Mexican drug cartels through Google.

The code, MOGO (Making Order Using Google as an Oracle) sifts through Google data to track activity and growth of cartels over the past decade. Here's the abstract of MOGO:

"A tool that uses Web content to obtain quantitative information about the mobility and modus operandi of criminal groups, information that would otherwise require the operation of large scale, expensive intelligence exercises to be obtained. Exploiting indexed reliable sources such as online newspapers and blogs, we use unambiguous query terms and Google's search engine to identify the areas of operation of criminal organizations, and to extract information about the particularities of their mobility patters. We apply our tool to Mexican criminal organizations to identify their market strategies, their preferred areas of operation, and the way in which these have evolved over the last two decades.."

Here are some of MOGO's findings,

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Zetas growth over the past decade:

Table 1: The main features extracted for each drug tracking organization.
Table 1: The main features extracted for each drug tracking organization.
Figure 4: The results distributions per tracker per year, for the most popular seven trackers.
Figure 4: The results distributions per tracker per year, for the most popular seven trackers.

Border & Immigration
John Rosman
John Rosman is the digital editor for KPBS News. He oversees all news content on KPBS.org and across all digital properties. Prior, John was the social media editor for Fronteras Desk. Before heading south, John was a digital producer for Oregon Public Broadcasting. There he led the flagship radio program Think Out Loud in all aspects of digital media. Working with OPB's cultural website, Arts & Life, he also produced multimedia features. By way of metro Detroit, John is a proud graduate of the University of Oregon's School of Journalism. He has worked as an editor in television and film. But he found his passion for public radio during a long winter, in a lonely hotdog stand. When John's away from the office, you can find him catching up on all the sun he missed in Oregon.
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