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Posts Tagged ‘public record searches’

Click Your Way Through A Public Record Search

September 29th, 2009

There are several ways of doing a public record search. You can go through the public records maintained with various government bodies, the library and the courthouse in your local area. All these methods of finding a public record do not have a cost attached to them. Having mentioned this, there are more alternatives for a public record search using paid services that exist on the World Wide Web and in the offline world too.

You can find public domains over the Internet that host public record systems, which are searchable at no cost. Government public records, in some cases, are freely accessible to the general public, but a majority of them, can be categorized as confidential. In normal circumstances, you have access to the bare minimum data but if you are interested in information, which is detailed or comprehensive in nature, you may be charged a monthly or one-time subscription fee for a more detailed access.

In earlier days, public record information was only stored in a paper format and was maintained in files. If there was a request for a public record search, then the required information had to be physically searched in files and retrieved. Some amount of the information is recorded on storage media such as microfilm, microfiche or a photographic copy but not all of it.

If you have any difficulty carrying out an in-depth public record search on your own, you can hire the services of a private investigator to help you, but such a method may become very costly at the end, depending on the period of the search.

A Public record search may require a lot of time to be spent digging if you are unaware how to go about doing it. Due to this reason, there exist several database companies that offer their services for public record search to save your efforts. You have the option to avail paid membership to join and access the company’s database all by yourself to find the desired information.

These exhaustive databases can in most cases be accessed on the Internet. Normally, the interface that you use to do a public record search is simple and friendly. You are charged a small membership fee, which gives you the facility of unlimited search capabilities at any time.

You can use this membership to access the entire database to look for addresses, birth records, death records, marriage records, criminal records, business records, phone numbers, civil records, and any other important piece of data that you may require.

The companies that provide these online public record searches are in good demand and are extensively used even by lawyers, private investigators, law enforcement bodies, and many other types of professionals. They are inclined to use these services, as the data is stored in one place, which makes it simpler and quicker to access.

Any person wanting to do a public record search to access an important piece of data can do so manually by visiting the courthouse of the respective area. This method, obviously, is a lengthy one since it may require a lot more research to be done by the person, which may delay the search process.

Shawn Public Records , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Free Public Record Searches

February 22nd, 2009

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:

  1. goto said search engine
  2. type in your search phrase
  3. 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

Shawn Public Records , , , ,