Hey Doug,

Slade and I wrote an article for Title Topics (The Ohio Land Title Association's newsletter), several months ago, about computer searching techniques and it included information about both wild cards and Soundex.  The strange thing about wild cards was that they worked on the web site for our county, but not on the actual system in the courthouse.  Soundex was not implemented at all.

I spoke to both ACS Business Records and Cott Systems and was pretty much told by both that they left that ability out intentionally.  The counties were concerned that people unfamiliar with how to use those more advanced techniques would miss things.  They were worried about the liability. 

I learned quite a bit in the course of writing it.  If I can find the article I will republish it here.

Robert A. Franco
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