Archive for January, 2013

TLO now owns Merlindata through the acquisition of another company that had recently purchased the public records data provider, in business since 1991 and much relied on by California private investigators.

Merlindata customers will now become TLO customers with access to the same data, albeit with a different interface and website. The California public records from Merlindata are not integrated into the people search and comprehensive reports in TLO but are a stand-alone product that incurs per-search fees on par with the other TLO offerings.

Merlindata customers who have an annual fee contract can continue on the same terms with a new TLO negotiated contract, but they will be charged monthly, not annually, as subscribers to Merlindata were.

TLO doesn’t offer an unlimited search option for access to their menu of searches. TLO’s “flaterate” is a reduced cost on the transactional fee. This reduced cost is available for accounts with at least 200 searches per month. In this arrangement, the subscriber might pay $.60 for each search rather than $1.00. The “flaterate” contract includes the TLO data and the newly acquired Merlindata California databases. However, they are not integrated and must be separately searched.

The Merlindata site now directs subscribers to transfer their account to TLO or to open an account if they’re not already a Merlin user.

IRBSearch, a reseller of the LexisNexis Accurint data, which is very similar to TLO’s, has undoubtedly taken a financial hit due to the low-cost pricing of TLO. This is the new favorite among private investigators. Hopefully that won’t lull investigators into relying on one online public records data source — which may become difficult to avoid if other companies’ products are out of reach because of pricing or restricted access to private investigators.

Craigslist has added a mapping feature that plots the location and displays a popup box of the listings you’ve searched. Query terms that appear within Craigslist housing offerings and view the location on a map. You can search by any term that appears in the ad, or by town, street or zip code to identify all the housing in the area. This image shows the listing I searched by telephone number. The mapping feature was also displayed in New York for items for sale, personals and community.

• Verify a CPA

• Venture Capital and Private Equity Database

• EDGAR Filings search

• Stop online tracking & malware | Disconnect

• eBay Power Search

• Archify: stores web and social history

• Nextdoor: Join the free private social network for your neighborhood

The rest of my favorite links are here.

Have you had the experience of searching an online court or Recorder index and getting a false negative? You know the name is there but it isn’t returned in your search results. Worse yet, you don’t know whether the record is there and assume it’s not because the site returned “no result.”

I was searching multiple names at the Alameda County Recorder Real Property index and found that results were returned only when the first name listed in a document was searched, but not the second name, even when that name was listed in the index. This only applies to shared last names, I believe.

I queried the name “Bennett, Lyle”, which returned a record in which that name was listed first. The index record for the document shows a second name, “Bennett, Doris.”

I searched the index for “Bennett, Doris” and received a “no record” message.

I’m sure the Recorder would like to hear from you about this glitch. I contacted the provider of the software and received an email directing me to resolve the problem with the Recorder.

What’s your experience searching online records?