Searching "alphabet soup" business names

Name searches for entities beginning with random combinations of two or more letters are remarkably common.  You know the type of name in question here, anything ranging from "GE Capital Mortgage Services" to "DFC Financial Associates" to "ZMS, LLC." 

The problem with retrieving all database records for these names is that there's no standardization of the names -- the party names go into the database with periods and spaces, and just as frequently go in without periods and spaces.  How do you account for them all?  And, how do you structure your search to get the most manageable yet comprehensive set of results?

There are two basic techniques you can use.  Remember that Court PC does not bill you for duplicate searches of what appears to be the same name.  Run a name as many times as you like or need to, and you'll only be billed for one search. 

So you can run the search three different ways, accounting for spaces and periods, such as "GE Capit*Mort" "G E Capit*Mort" and "G.E. Capit*Mort" or "DFC Finan" "D F C Finan" and "D.F.C. Finan"  The other technique is to string some wildcards together and hope for the best, as with searches for  D*F*C*Finan or Z*M*S*

Let's take a look at some actual records.  The image below shows an alphabetical sampling of records for "GE Capital Mortgage Services..." with red arrows marking three groups of records.  The first group of three records uses a space between the G and the E; the second group uses periods after the G and the E; and the third group uses neither spaces nor periods.

If you structure a search for this name as G*E*CAPIT*MORTG the database will return all the records above, plus any records for GENERAL ELECTRIC CAPITAL MORTGAGE.   That may be great, if your intention is to capture all of the thousands of records for this entity.

If you intend to exclude the records for GENERAL ELECTRIC, though, you should probably plan the search differently.  Run the search as three different searches:  G E CAPIT*MORTG; G.E. CAPIT*MORTG and GE CAPIT*MORTG and combine the results.   Why?  Because the first strategy won't allow you to use the Refine Search feature to filter out the unwanted records without filtering the results using each of those three different terms anyhow. 

This GE Capital example is useful because the letter combination stands for something we all know, and because we can also expect that there will be lots of matching records.  If you had a less common and less well-known triad of random letters beginning the business name, you should consider the using the same approach.  Let's take the other example I used before, ZMS, LLC.

You might assume that the letter combo ZMS is so unusual that a search for Z*M*S*L*C would only pull up the relevant records.  Remember, however, that the asterisk wildcard will match any letter, character, space or number, no matter how many there are.   So you'll also get matching records for ZAVARELLA FAMILY PARTNERSHIP LLC   and ZERO SIX SIX ZERO SIX WILLIAM STREET LLC. 

That's not much of an issue here, as there are only 13 records out of 21 listed above that are irrelevant to your search.  But there are only eight records for ZMS LLC, so the irrelevant records can easily outnumber the relevant ones.  And if you happened to run the search as Z*M*S* because you thought that unusual letter combination wasn't likely to produce that many matches, you'd get something like the records listed below, plus hundreds of other records for Zoning Commissions across the state.  The best strategy, once again, would probably to be to run the search three times, as ZMS, Z M S and Z.M.S.