Philosophy
The Commissioner Jules Maigret is a fictional French police detective, created by Georges Simenon. His investigation method is based on understanding the personality of different people and their interactions.
TL;DR: Username => Dossier
Maigret is designed to gather all the available information about person by his username.
What kind of information is this? First, links to person accounts. Secondly, all the machine-extractable pieces of info, such as: other usernames, full name, URLs to people’s images, birthday, location (country, city, etc.), gender.
All this information forms some dossier, but it also useful for other tools and analytical purposes.
Each collected piece of data has a label of a certain format (for example, follower_count for the number
of subscribers or created_at for account creation time) so that it can be parsed and analyzed by various
systems and stored in databases.
Origins
Maigret started from studying what OSINT investigators actually use in practice — and from the realization that many popular tools do not deliver real investigative value. The original research behind this observation is summarized in the article What’s wrong with namecheckers. For a broader landscape of username-checking tools, see the curated OSINT namecheckers list.
Two ideas grew out of that research:
socid-extractor — a library focused on pulling structured identity data (user IDs, full names, linked accounts, bios, timestamps, etc.) out of account pages and public API responses, so that finding an account is not the end of the pipeline.
Maigret itself — which started as a fork of Sherlock but has long since outgrown the original project in coverage, extraction depth, and check reliability. Today Maigret is used as a component by major OSINT vendors in their commercial products.