Two issues arise here in the records.  One is the piecemeal approach to public records that has occurred county-by-county to public records.  Each county chooses to, or not to, post records with a different database system.  While two primary systems dominate the landscape, there are about 5 others available online in various counties.  As an example, San Mateo County uses a system called "WeCare", while Santa Clara County (right "next door") uses a modified CRIS+ database.  As the vendors of these systems are recalictrant in modifying or allowing modifications, the county (and the users) are stuck with whatever options & features are initially purchased.

This lends to a static attitude in these offices.  Entire tech departments paid for by our tax dollars are really there to call up Colorado when the system glitches, and to confirm it's not their local hardware causing the problem first.

The second aspect to this situation is that, while the databases could potentially extend backwards further, it would take thousands of man hours to index all of that data.  We are in fact only talking about the hand-indexed data of the Grantor-Grantee rolls, and not images of actual documents which are still not postable in California due to the privacy laws on the books.  The indexed data posted online is only that data which has been hand-indexed onto a database, which was started in San Mateo County in 1984, and in Santa Clara County (the heart of Silicon Valley) in 1981.  It is worth noting that Santa Clara recently finished a "digital reel" which is a scanned-image database of it's older grantor-grantee indices as well.  We hope that they will post access to this soon, but suspect that the additional bandwidth issues may need to be resolved beforehand both in acquisition and in cost.

Hope that helps answer some of it.