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Do a Free Public Records Search with Pretrieve
Find Free Public Records on the Web

By Wendy Boswell, About.com Guide

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Pretrieve Business Search

Switch the text tab on the main Pretrieve page to business, type in the busines you'd like more information on (along with city and state), and here's what you'll get:

Financial Information: Look at UCC filings by debtor name, SEC filings, federally-excluded parties, and more.
Legal and Government: Corporate registration records, patent records search, OIG excluded individuals or entities, etc.
Trade-related information: The Council of Better Business Bureaus' Reliability Report and domain name registrations for that business (interesting to type in big names here, like Google or Yahoo).
Research: Article citations and Web mentions of that particular business name.
Miscellaneous: Kind of skimpy here; you can find out if anyone from that business is the registered owner of any aircraft.

Pretrieve Free Address Finder and Phone Number Search

The results that you'll get when you go to the Pretrieve home page and select either address or phone are pretty much the same results you'll get when you choose person. However, you are given some extra search helps in the form of Pretrieve's Advanced Person Search.

Pretrieve Advanced Search for Free Public Records

People Finder Advanced Search: More fields equals narrowed results.
Business Search Advanced: If you know the business's county, phone number, or ticker symbol, Pretrieve will be able to return results for you.
Advanced Address Search: Type in the zip code or county if you know it for more relevant results.
Phone Number Search: No advanced search for phone numbers, but with the advanced search options available to you above, you should still be able to narrow down your search and find what you're looking for.

In addition, Pretrieve has a number of search shortcuts available to you oddly enough on the tools page; you can just type these in to the main search field and away you go:

name, city, state (e.g.- "doe san francisco, ca")
address, city, state (e.g.- "123 main st. san francisco ca")
name, zip code (e.g.- "j doe 94127")

Pretrieve Public Records Search Tools

Pretrieve has a couple of cool public records search tools available to the user, including a Firefox search plugin, and a custom search column on A9.com.

Why Should I Use Pretrieve?

In a word? Shortcut. Instead of combing through all these sites one by one, your results are returned simply on one screen. There are few ads clogging up the screen real estate, and while some of the tabbed results pages seem a bit sparse, I would look for Pretrieve to be adding more search options very soon.