About Searchadex

The public records lookup professionals actually use.

What Searchadex Is

Searchadex is a free directory of official government portals for public records research across all 50 states. We don't store records, don't resell data, and don't charge for access. Every link goes straight to the authoritative source — Secretary of State databases for business entities and UCC liens, county assessors and recorders for property, state judiciary portals and county clerks for court files, state health departments for vital records, state police and corrections agencies for criminal and registry data, and state treasuries for unclaimed property. If a free official portal exists, we want it indexed here, with enough context that you know what it will and won't give you before you click.

Who Runs Searchadex

Searchadex is published by Elle Media Group and edited in-house by the Searchadex editorial team. The site was founded by a commercial lender with 15 years in SBA and C&I lending, who ran entity, UCC, and license searches on every deal file before it went to committee. Day-to-day research, portal testing, and writing are handled by that founding editor together with a small group of contributing researchers drawn from underwriting, compliance, paralegal, and title-search backgrounds — people whose previous jobs required them to pull these exact records for a living.

Editorial decisions — which portals we list, how we describe them, what caveats we publish — are made only by the editorial team. Advertisers and affiliate partners have no input into rankings, placement, or wording, and no partner has ever been added to a page as a substitute for a free official source.

How We Verify and Update Portal Links

The "reviewed quarterly" line on our pages is a real production process, not a badge. Each quarter we work through the directory state by state on a published calendar and repeat the same five steps for every entry:

Open the link by hand. An editor loads every portal in a browser — no automated status-code check alone, because a government site can return a valid page that no longer contains the search tool.
Run a live test search. We execute a real query (a known business name, a known parcel, a sample case or claim search) to confirm the tool still returns results and still returns them without payment.
Re-confirm the cost line. We check what remains free to view and where a fee begins — certified copies, per-page document images, subscription county portals, fingerprint-based background checks — and correct our "Free online?" rating if it has changed.
Trace the source of authority. Where a state has moved a system (a new case-management portal, a consolidated licensing site, a health department transferring older records to archives), we follow the agency's own announcement page and link to the agency, not to a third-party mirror.
Log the result. Every entry gets a pass, correct, or replace outcome with the date and the editor's initials in our internal change log, which is what drives the "last updated" date shown on each page.

Between quarterly passes we act on two other triggers: reader reports of broken links, which we test the same day and resolve within 48 hours, and monitoring of agency notices in the categories that change most often — court case-management migrations, election portals in the run-up to registration deadlines, and vital-records ordering systems.

Why You Can Trust What You Read Here

Official sources only. A government agency is the primary link on every entry. Paid services, when we mention them at all, appear below the free guidance and are labeled as advertising.
We publish the limits, not just the link. If a portal requires an exact name match, excludes sealed or expunged files, omits sale prices, restricts records to immediate family, or only works in person, we say so in the entry itself.
No records held by us. Searchadex never receives, stores, or resells record data. Your searches happen on the government's site, under the government's terms.
Corrections are welcome and credited. Government URLs change without notice; if you find one that has moved, our contact form alerts an editor directly.
Clear separation of advertising. Affiliate and ad placements are disclosed on the page they appear on and never change which official portal we recommend.

What Searchadex Is Not

Searchadex is not a background check service, a consumer reporting agency, or an FCRA-compliant data provider. Nothing on this site may be used to make employment, tenant, credit, insurance, or similar eligibility decisions. For those uses you need a licensed FCRA-compliant provider. We point you to records that are, by law, open to the public — and we tell you when a record is not.

Contact and Corrections

Found a broken link, an outdated portal, or a missing state resource? Send it through our contact form. Verified corrections are made within 48 hours and noted in the change log behind the page's "last updated" date.