Free Public Record Searches
One of the most asked questions we get from people wanting to do their own background checks is “Where/how do you find websites that offer public records?”. Free public record searches are possible by almost anyone these days. All it takes is a decent Internet connection and the ability to use search engines like Google or Yahoo correctly.
Most people are familiar with the basic techniques when using search engines:
- goto said search engine
- type in your search phrase
- hope that what you’re looking for pops up in the results
Usually the basic method of searching will provide reasonable results when searching for most things but when doing free public record searches it can often be difficult to locate websites that can be helpful. Most are government type websites that aren’t built properly for search engine rankings so they’re buried deep in the results if you can find them at all.
Using the “advanced search” features of the search engines can often help filter out all of the crap and display more helpful results. For instance, did you know that when using Google you can filter the search results to only include websites that end with “.com”(or any other extension for that matter)?
I’ve found that when doing free public record searches this can be the difference between finding the information you’re looking for and just giving up all together. Let’s look at an example using Google.
Suppose you wanted to look for “marriage records” in Tennessee. Most people would goto Google and type in marriage records Tennessee. If you’re lucky you may find what you’re looking for with that but most likely you’ll get a bunch of commercial sites offering the records for a fee.
To help narrow down your search and weed out most of the commercial websites you could append site: -.com to the same search phrase and probably get more accurate results. So instead of searching for:
marriage records Tennessee
search for
marriage license Tennessee site: -.com
or
“marriage license Tennessee” site: -.com
Keep in mind that each and every search will be different. You’ll just have to look at the results returned and decide for yourself what to do. Also, each search engine is going to be different when it comes to their advanced search features. You’ll need to use the appropriate commands for each search engine.
Using these techniques will help you get better results on your free public record searches. To make it even easier I’ve created a program called Public Record Website Locator that does all of this for me so I don’t have to type everything in each time. You can download and use it for free if you want to try it
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