Government and Public Records Lookup
Search API patterns for locating public filings, notices, and government pages.
The problem
Public records — permits, filings, meeting minutes, procurement notices — are legally public but scattered across thousands of independently run government websites with wildly inconsistent structure, search functionality, and update frequency, making cross-jurisdiction lookup a genuinely hard aggregation problem.
How the workflow is built
Queries are scoped with `site:` filters to specific government domains (`.gov`, state and county portals) combined with the record type and relevant identifiers (name, address, permit number), since general web search alone rarely surfaces the specific government page directly without that domain scoping.
Example queries
site:[county].gov building permit "[address]""[business name]" business license lookup site:[state].govcity council meeting minutes "[topic]" site:[city].gov
Pitfalls to watch for
- Government site structures and search functionality change with surprisingly little notice when a jurisdiction migrates platforms, and a query pattern that worked reliably for months can silently stop returning results after a backend migration.
- Not all public records are actually indexed by search engines even when technically published online — many sit behind a jurisdiction's own internal search tool that general web crawlers don't reach, so a search-API-only approach has real coverage gaps for this vertical specifically.
- Record accuracy and recency vary enormously by jurisdiction — some update filings within days, others lag by months — so a 'no results found' response needs to be distinguished from 'this jurisdiction just doesn't publish this promptly.'