# How Do Online People Search Sites Get Their Info? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [September 16, 2015, 8:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-online-people-search-sites-get-their-info/731507 "2015-09-16T20:38:25Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 4\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Fotheringay-Phipps](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/d9b06d/32.png) [@Fotheringay-Phipps](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Fotheringay-Phipps)\ **Post date:** [September 16, 2015, 8:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-online-people-search-sites-get-their-info/731507/1 "2015-09-16T20:38:25Z")
I understand that their information is all public information that anyone can get by going down to the relevant government agencies or courts. But the question is how these sites get it into their online databases. It would hardly seem feasible for them to manually transcribe every publically available bit of info on every person in the US just in case someone later wants to a search on related people. ---
**Author:** ![dolphinboy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dolphinboy/32/330_2.png) [@dolphinboy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dolphinboy)\ **Post date:** [September 16, 2015, 8:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-online-people-search-sites-get-their-info/731507/2 "2015-09-16T20:49:33Z")
Digital downloads. Most government agencies will provide data downloads of public information, perhaps with some cost associated with it, to companies who have a need for that information. Most of this information is digitized anyway. ---
**Author:** ![Sage\_Rat](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/sage_rat/32/399_2.png) [@Sage\_Rat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sage_Rat)\ **Post date:** [September 16, 2015, 8:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-online-people-search-sites-get-their-info/731507/3 "2015-09-16T20:54:12Z")
I don’t know if it is used, but there’s also [OCR](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_character_recognition). If used, probably they would need to customize their software for all the different form layouts that the government provides - like, look for a box in this area and assume that the big text in it is a person’s last name - and you would want people to glance over and correct any obvious errors, but it would allow you to speed things up by a fair amount when dealing with paper. ---
**Author:** ![dolphinboy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dolphinboy/32/330_2.png) [@dolphinboy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dolphinboy)\ **Post date:** [September 16, 2015, 9:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-online-people-search-sites-get-their-info/731507/4 "2015-09-16T21:33:38Z")
> [@Sage\_Rat](#): > > I don’t know if it is used, but there’s also [OCR](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_character_recognition). If used, probably they would need to customize their software for all the different form layouts that the government provides - like, look for a box in this area and assume that the big text in it is a person’s last name - and you would want people to glance over and correct any obvious errors, but it would allow you to speed things up by a fair amount when dealing with paper. Yes, sorry I misunderstood your question. There is a variety of software, OCR or Optical character Recognition, and hardware that you can feed documents into that can convert those documents into digital form, such as pdfs. Those digital documents can then be loaded into a relational database and people can then search the database and pull up the associated documents. They have been doing this for quite some time and can process hundreds of thousands of documents over days and weeks, and much of this can be automated so you don’t need someone to hand feed a piece of paper into scanner one by one. Nowadays, when you fill out a form they usually have you do it using a computer in order to capture the data so that it can be directly stored in a database for searching later.