In my daily tour of the Internet I’ve been noticing a consolidation of public records search sites, which seem to be getting gobbled up by the database aggregator Intelius. This company’s primary business targets the consumer who makes the infrequent purchase of a people finder profile. Perhaps it’s my imagination but it seems as if Intelius is acquiring additional sites, based on looking at their interface and the link to the Intelius database.

Publicrecordfinder claims, to be the “Largest Public Records Directory”, which sounds strangely similar to SearchSystems.net, which is probably the oldest public records directory on the Internet, and collects links to government-operated online databases of public record indexes and documents. SearchSystems is the brainchild of Tim Koster, who is still the owner, and bills itself as the “Largest Free Public Records Directory.” I found most of the listed sites on the Publicrecordfinder site (I searched the Missouri page.) were dead links. The rest were a mixture of Intelius fee searches, government home pages and some government database indexes.

“The World’s Largest Directory of Internet Addresses” (iaf.net) is another Intelius linked site.

All these hyperbolical declarations of “the largest” got me wondering which other sites are making similar claims. I formulated an Internet search: allintitle: “world’s largest * directory”, and discovered “the world’s largest arabic sex directory,” which apparently refers to the gender of baby naming.

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