We’ve had online search capabilities since we first installed the system in 2008/2009. But the biggest change is the new version of the public search. What I think is, like, the amazing part of it is that it can actually search through the text of a document. Searching in recorder’s offices has been by what was indexed, what was entered into manual indexes and then computer indexes by the staff for the names of parties to the document, maybe property identifiers, such as the numbers we use now.
The new public search not only can search what we’ve indexed our key data, but it can actually read through that document. So you might be able to find a related party name that’s been buried in a document for many, many years, that’s been converted to a machine readable format, and you’ll be able to search that right from home in our public search site. You can leave all your search criteria blank and hit the search button. It’ll bring up within seconds, every single record at that county, which ours is probably over 15 to 18 million records within seconds. So that capability to me is just, like, outstanding.
One of the things that I always had in the back of my mind when we first started with the Neumo system back in 2008, is how it could prepare us for some sort of disaster in the future. Emergency management people would say, oh, what happens if half your staff is out with the flu? And that was about as far as extent as we thought. But here, 2020 comes along with the COVID pandemic, and one of the best side benefits of having the Neumo system is we could continue the operation of the office remotely. So most of our staff went home. We could access the system online ourselves.
Searching was really not any sort of an effect because the searchers were used to doing it from home for years before that. And when COVID was over, they never came back. That was, like, the best preparedness for COVID, and I really feel bad for a lot of the counties throughout the country that didn’t have that online presence, didn’t have the ability to work remotely because that just stopp
