How to Use Google to Search For Government Court Record Databases

If you’re looking to search for court records then there are a number of ways you can go about it. Some can be time-consuming, while other ways will get you the information you require much quicker, and often with much less hassle. In this article, we’ll go over just two of main ways in which you can obtain court records.

The first way in which you can obtain records is probably one that has already occurred to you, and this is to obtain the records directly from the courthouse where they were originally. Many courthouses maintain an archive of all the court cases that have been filed within the courthouse’s jurisdiction.

Direct, certainly; but the one disadvantage of obtaining court records this way is you may not know which specific courthouse to contact. This way is often also very time consuming, and it can be tedious having to visit several courthouses for information on past and pending cases regarding a specific party.

The second option is to use Google to perform a search on court records for a particular state, for example “Alabama court records”. Google, being a search engine; crawls the web and “indexes” webpages it finds every single day. These pages will inevitably be relevant to user’s search queries, so if the information is out there; Google knows and will point you in the right direction if you simply search for it.

Often when using this approach Google will provide results consisting of links to relevant government websites from which you can search in more detail. More often than not, these websites provide public access to digitized court records, allowing you to search often by name, case type and case number. This should provide you with the information you need.

Using this same approach, you could try breaking down you search to a specific county or city/town. You could even use this approach to search for other types of public records as well. For example, you could use it to search for prison/inmate records, sex offender records and criminal history records.

There you have it, the two main ways to go about obtaining court case information, but; there is also a third way, and that is to use an online service which provides you with access to their proprietary databases, which often contains court files from courts nationwide. These services obtain court records in bulk, and it is worth performing a search to see if you get a match. A fee is normally required for access however.