David-
I must confess that I read the posts from you people "out West" with a great deal of astonishment and sympathy.  You truly have a hard row to hoe out there, and the concept of driving 100 miles to do a search is simply horrific. 

Here in Northern Virginia, it's a little more developed, although not as much as one might expect.  There are only four counties where one can do searches on-line. (There is one other, but the imaging isn't always reliable - one invariably can complete all but one search, and that one will need just one copy to complete.)  

Having previously done searches in Massachusetts some 10 years ago, I was astonished to find Virginia lagging so far behind.  I think this is because of the way the county budgets are run here and I also am told that those budgets were cut severly sometime in the past.  Maybe Shannon will know something more about that.  Although with the amount of revenue that must have been generated during the re-fi frenzy, I have to wonder.

At any rate, those four counties have proven to be, at least so far and only as far as my company has experienced them, reliable and accurate.  I believe that the databases are those maintained by the county, and not by essentially recreating and re-entering the information onto a website. 

The only real issue that seems to have generated some excitement is the social security numbers being made available to the public, and I believe the bulk of the Virginia counties decided that they would not record documents where the signers social security numbers appeared.  Of course, this does nothing for the documents that were recorded prior to that decision; however, since those documents are a matter of public record, all the potential identiy thief would need to do is go to his friendly local record room and get them there.

At any rate, it's obvious that the issues and problems we are all dealing are numerous and vary greatly from place to place.  I am very curious to see how this national certification is going to work.