From Wendy Boswell,
Your Guide to Web Search.
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Note: As of June 2007, Pretrieve has re-routed their previously free people, business, and phone number searches to Intelius, a pay-for-information site. I'll update as more information becomes available.

What is Pretrieve?

Pretrieve is a free public records search engine that enables the user to find relevant, free public records associated with a person's name, business name, phone number, or address. It's easy to use and turns up a surprisingly good amount of relevant information.

How To Find Free Public Records With Pretrieve

Get to the Pretrieve home page. You'll notice that the Pretrieve home page is very simple and uncluttered, always one of my preferences, and it's very easy to immediately get started.

The default setting for Pretrieve's search is person. You'll see three search boxes: one for the person's name, city, and state. Simply type in this information and you'll get a surprising amount of truly relevant results.Once you decide who you'd like to search for (type in your own name just for kicks), this is what you'll get back in your main search results (tabbed with different search results pages). All links open in a new window.

• Phone number and address. This will be right at the top of your search results.
• Property Info. Links that go directly to the sites cited in the search results (rather than just the entry page). For Property Info, you get information such as comparable real estate sales, Google satellite map, census data, and household 2004 Presidential campaign contributions. Again, all these links go straight to the search results for your particular person.
• Criminal Information. Find out if your person has a criminal record. Searches for both state and federal prison records.
• Financial Information. For Financial public records, you get links to UCC filings by debtor name, federally-excluded parties, personal political contributions, and much more.
• Professional Information: Returns results for professional history, attorney license search, patent records search, etc.
• Local Information: Find out what the schools are like around your person's area, pollution reports, or local political contributions made by people in that zip code.
• Research Information: Learn if your person has written any articles lately, or been mentioned in the news or on the Web.
• Miscellaneous Information: Find birth dates, death dates, or if your person is the registered owner of any aircraft.

Go on to the next page of this Pretrieve profile to learn more about Pretrieve's free business search, free address search, and free phone number search.