As a former employee of Nationwide for their Texas Ops as of last year, their internal search dept is just that; internal.  They use their own staff in their Pittsburgh area location to utilize online records of over 200+ online counties.  They were considering last year to utilize "off shore" companies to assist in part of the production of their products to help lower their production costs and improve turn times of their title products.  I left before any major roll-out of this occurred.  Nationwide is owned by Capital Title Group out of Scottsdale, AZ.  Some of Nationwide's corporate direction is being driven by the parent company.  

Nationwide took cues from others like Lenders First Choice which did (or does) a large amount of production with a vendor in India.  I also was an employee there as well and know they do a large number of searches using online records. They can take an order today, get the online search work produced within an hour in most cases and obtain doc images as well, scan in the results with doc copies and have it being processed in India the same day.  Upon completion, the work would be delivered back to the US location from India (sometimes within the same day and usually, the next morning), where the US location would QC and send out to the client.  This happened daily. With daily order counts hitting over 1000 orders a day, it made sense for them to utilize a more cost effective way to process work.  They frankly would not have the workspace for the number of additional employees needed to key the data.  Advantages like getting work processed today (your time) by a compnay on the otherside of the globe where their today is our tomorrow and getting it back quickly made sense for them.  

This is the mind-set as lenders want their title work ASAP.  Remember, the more loans a lender closes in a month the greater the bookings.  The greater the bookings the greater the profit.  Those that can help their client (the lender) book more loans at month end will be those that get more marketshare.