From Poynter's Al Tompkins, author of Al's Morning Meeting:
Few things make me happier than when the government opens their databases to the people. The good people at ResourceShelf recently wrote about this beautiful wiki collection of state databases
that includes information on businesses, licensed professionals, plots
of land and even dates of fish stocking. Some of this content is
available on search engines, but much of it is part of the invisible
Web.
While I am at it, let me mention one of the few "for-pay" sites that I rely on for state records lookups. Searchsystems.net
(which costs me $4.95 per month) includes 39,000 public record
databases in all 50 states and beyond. The collection includes business
information, corporate filings, property records, deeds, mortgages,
criminal and civil court filings, inmates, offenders, births, deaths,
marriages, unclaimed property, professional licenses and much more.
