I was looking at property records and property lines for my state yesterday to try to resolve a question that my mom had regarding land that she was getting.

The first two and a half pages of search results are all websites where you have to pay a subscription fee in order to get the land owner's information.

This is all information that is provided by my state free of charge via their website. I had to filter through two and a half pages before I found the original source of the information that all of those websites are leeching off.

It's ridiculous the amount of paid services that use free-to-use services, it's just they pay more of an advertising, so therefore they're the only thing the user sees.

If I hadn't already known that the state provided it free a charge to anyone who asked or went on their website anyway, I likely would have figured it just cost money to request the records.