Search for Instagram user bios

Search for Instagram bios

Searching for information on Instagram can be more difficult than you think. For example, how can you search for information contained in a user’s biography? If you try this via the Instagram search bar, you will see that this does not work. In this article we explain how you can investigate the bio of a user on Instagram via a search engine.

Search on Instagram

Searching for information on Instagram, how do you actually do that? To find out, we visit the Instagram website (www.instagram.com). When we visit this website, it appears that you need an account to continue.

To be able to search on Instagram, we don’t necessarily need an account. For example, type “/test” or any name of a user after “www.instagram.com“, and you will see that you end up on the profile of that user on Instagram. In addition to being able to view this profile now, you can also use the Instagram search bar to search for other information.

Search via the Instagram search bar

If we use the Instagram search bar, we can search in three ways. We will explain this with an example. For example, type the word “Amsterdam” into the Instagram search bar. The results that you now see consist of locations, hashtags (#) and user accounts.

Search for a user on Instagram

Now suppose we want to search for the user “Donald Trump” on Instagram. Then we can use the search bar for that and search by name. In the search results you will get different accounts in which the keywords “Donald Trump” appear.

If we click through on the “realdonaldtrump” account, we will end up on the verified Instagram account of Donald Trump (see image below). The profile has the username “realdonaldtrump” (marked in red) and the name “President Donald J. Trump” (marked in yellow). Furthermore, “45th President of the United States” (marked in blue) is also displayed. This last part is also called the biography or the “bio” of an account.

Let’s go back: we found the above Instagram account because we searched with the keywords “Donald Trump“. The question is whether we would also find this account if we searched for the username, name or bio of this account. Below are the results of searching for the username “realdonaldtrump“.

It is therefore possible to find the account based on the username. What about searching for an account name? You can see that below when we search for “President Donald J. Trump“. Searching by name also seems to be possible via the Instagram search bar.

Finally we try to search on the bio of a user on Instagram. For this we type the bio “45th President of the United States” in the Instagram search bar (see below). The weird thing is that we don’t get any results with the profile of Donald Trump.

What conclusions can we draw from this?

From the results of the search queries above, we can conclude the following three things with regard to searching via the Instagram search bar:

1. Searching by username (“realdonaldtrump“) is possible;
2. Searching by name (“President Donald J. Trump“) is also possible;
3. Search by user bio (“45th President of the United States“) is not possible.

How can we search for the bio of an Instagram user?

Instagram does not offer the possibility to search for information in the user’s bio via the search bar. So we have to search for other options. For this we return toregular search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo (of course other search engines also work). If we search via Google for the bio “45th President of the United States” on the website instagram.com, we will see the search result below.

Hey! That is weird, now we get to see a search result with the link to the profile “realdonaldtrump” on Instagram. Clicking on this account does indeed lead to the account that we have previously viewed, which means that searching for the bio via a search engine does make sense. So if you want to search within the bio of a user on Instagram, always try to find information via a search engine. For example, if you search for a telephone number or e-mail address, you can search on site: instagram.com “xxx@gmail.com”or on site: instagram.com “06-xxx”.

Are there any Instagram tools available?

There are of course various tools available to search for information on Instagram. We have made a separate overview, which overview can be found here. For example, with Searchmy.bio you can search for bios, you can search for names and user names with Gramuser.com and you can search for text within messages with Mulpix.com.

Want to know more?

Do you want to know more about how you can effectively search for information on Instagram? Then contact us or register for one of our OSINT training courses. Do you also have tips or suggestions for this article? Please let us know!