Here's some tips regarding in-depth research on particular topics (aka Deep Diving)
Be careful where you stick your nose. You know what they say about cats and curiosity.
1: Check Links - Similar to the oldfag agage "Always check the file extension on creepypasta...Always" Don't click sketchy domains (3rd world countries, sketchy developed countries, .biz, .wierddomainhere, etc) if the search engine description appears to be exactly what you're searching for, it's probably anything but. You might as well type "deepstate" and click "I'm feeling lucky". You're searching for diamonds in the rough, and it wont be handed to you on a silver platter. Be wary.
2: Official Websites - Maybe waltzing through the front door of your research subject company or organization's website is not the best idea. Inbound traffic is logged, including IP addresses, visit duration, the webpage you're coming from (if applicable), areas of the site you visited, etc. For example, today's news of the Evergreen Shipping cargo ship stuck in the Suez. If I was investigating possible ties between Evergreen Shipping and a shadowy cabal involved in human trafficking, I would absolutely not visit the Evergreen Shipping website.
3: Timing - See above. Perhaps you could check the Evergreen site at a time when its receiving a lot of traffic after a news article breaks...or perhaps they're giving all traffic extra scrutiny to see who's being nosy...your call...
4: News Articles - Get in the habit of using the 'news' tab on search engines. You can search by date, most recent, etc. Chances are (decent journalists do exist, contrary to what CNN would lead you to believe) someone has already done a bit of legwork for you. Any decent journalist will also have sourced their work, giving you more leads to follow. These days, with the sad state of the media narrative, you also may be able to glean information by what they choose to omit from their articles. You should be able to tell at a glance what news sites are shill and what are legit. Bullshit comes in many forms and is certainly not restricted to mainstream media.
5: Wikipedia - Love it or hate it, it's hands-down the quickest and easiest way to brush up on almost any topic in existence. Also check article sources for furthur leads and page edit history for anomalies.
6: Tangents - Going off on a tangent is the name of the game and often will lead to paydirt. You should be exploring all avenues connected to the subject and maintaining the ability to retrace your steps. Meaning, be able to relocate a passage you read hours or days ago.
I guess that's all for now.
Two more points to add here.
-use a vpn, TOR, or some other method of network encryption or obfuscation. While the NSA, elite hackers, or other very advanced threats likely would still be able to track you down, this will likely protect you from 99% of stuff you would be worried about. No need to worry about checking out Evergreen's website for example, if you can't easily be traced.
-Archive just about everything you see that looks even remotely important. Stuff disappears ALL THE FUCKING TIME. Oh you remember seeing some random ass article 3 weeks back that just because relevant? Well good luck, you probably wouldn't find it anyway due to how many things you've read since then, and if by some miracle you remember the URL, it's probably gone anyway. You can use the internet archive, saving pages as pdf/html, screenshots, or if you're more tech savvy you can get a docker image for archivebox which is a local self-hosted internet archive website.
What I use is Private Internet Access and/or TOR for my vpn. They've been good, and they "say" they don't keep logs. They got bought out by another company super recently though, so I'd recommend doing more research before picking a VPN provider. For archiving I use archivebox as an archiving backend. It gives me a local self hosted URL I can go to, paste in whatever links I want, and it'll save them complete with text/images/video or whatever. I then use an install of sist2 search, as a local search engine to search through all saved content. It parses text, so for example I could search "evergreen", and it'd display all files/saved articles containing the word evergreen. Once configured and indexed it's very fast and effective. What is best about these options is even if the whole internet were to go out tomorrow, you'd still have complete offline access to your entire archive.