We designed this site to make searching simple. Type in a name, organization or address in the search box. In indexing public records, we consider each row as having at most two parties. It's easiest to think of two party rows as having a "to" party and a "from" party. Some rows (such as business licenses) may have only one party.
There are two distinct search pages on publicaccountability.org that provide two different ways to search the data. The first, which we're calling a name search is a search for a name or address as it appears as a party in any of the datasets we've indexed. The second, a dataset search returns returns rows from a single dataset.
Results are initially ranked by relevance. No more than 500 results are displayed at a time; any more than that and the results will be paginated. Re-sorting the results by clicking on the column headers of the dataset search page will only resort the results shown on that page. It's often easier to do complex data manipulation by downloading the data first and then working on it in a spreadsheet program.
The full original records can be downloaded from the dataset search results page. Downloading the results from a name search gives only the name and address of the matching party. Downloading the dataset specific results, however, returns all the fields available in the original file.
Downloads are capped at 10,000 rows. If you are looking for more data than this, please contact us, or see the documentation for information about the source data.
Addresses are shown in a standardized format according to published U.S. address standardization rules. "Parkway" is shortened to "PKWY," for instance. If you enter a search term and click on the "address" search, the same standardization is applied to your search term. That standardization is not applied, if you search by "Name" or "Both" fields.