You have a name but no username: find public profiles on 3000+ sites with one API call

#osint #api #opensource #automation

Most profile lookups start from a handle. In practice you often start from a name: a lead list, a candidate, a counterparty in a due diligence file. Nobody gives you the username.

I built an Apify Actor around the open-source Maigret engine (MIT) that closes that gap. You send a name, it builds the usernames a real person would plausibly have picked, ranks them, and checks each one against the full Maigret site catalogue.

What happens to a name

Give it "John Smith" and it tries candidates such as johnsmith, john.smith, john_smith and smithjohn, best guess first. Each candidate is checked against 3000+ sites. You get one row per confirmed public profile.

Input

names: up to 10 names per run
maxPermutations: how many username candidates to build per name (default 6)
siteScope: top300, top500 or all3000
minConfidence: drop weak matches, useful for common names
monitorMode: on a schedule, return only what changed since the last run

{
  "names": ["John Smith"],
  "maxPermutations": 6,
  "siteScope": "top500",
  "minConfidence": 0.5
}

Output

Every row carries a rowType, so filtering is one expression. A profile-found row looks like this:

{
  "rowType": "profile-found",
  "name": "John Smith",
  "username": "john.smith",
  "site": "GitHub",
  "url": "https://github.com/john.smith",
  "category": "Developer",
  "confidence": 1.0
}

Confidence is about the person, not the account

A match only tells you that a username exists on a site. The confidence score tries to answer a different question: how likely is it that this handle belongs to the person you named. A username that contains every part of the name scores high. A bare first name scores low, because thousands of unrelated people use it.

Treat the result as a lead to verify, not as proof of identity.

Where it fits

sales and recruiting: find the public GitHub, X or Medium presence of a name on a list
due diligence: a first pass before manual review
monitoring: a weekly schedule that reports only new or changed profiles

By default the rows hold account-existence evidence only. Profile fields such as bio or location are opt-in. The Actor only reads publicly reachable pages and never logs in. Use it where you have a lawful basis, and follow the laws that apply to you, including GDPR and similar rules.

The Actor: Social Media Finder by Name on Apify

I build these Actors at Ntriq (Korea). If you want another output field, tell me in the comments.

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