Name screening is the only part of this site where a mistake can directly harm a person who has done nothing. It is worth being precise about what a search result is.
What the search actually does
You type a name. It is normalised — case folded, punctuation stripped, spacing regularised — and compared against the normalised form of every name variant recorded in the list snapshots we hold. Each hit comes back with a similarity score.
The score measures how alike two strings are. It does not measure how likely it is that you found the right person, and it is not a confidence level. A score of one hundred percent means two strings are identical after normalisation, which for a common name is an ordinary event that identifies nobody.
Why one spelling is never enough
Names cross writing systems, and there is no single correct way to render a name from one script into another. Authorities use different conventions, so the same person appears on two lists under spellings that share few letters.
Name order varies too: family name first or last, patronymics included or dropped, particles joined or separate. Companies add their own variation — legal form suffixes, translated versus transliterated trading names, punctuation.
This is why lists publish alias sets, and why a search that returns nothing has told you something about the spelling you used rather than something about the person.
Weak aliases exist for a reason
Authorities themselves mark some published name variants as unreliable for identification: fragments, extremely common names, spellings too generic to distinguish anyone. A match against one of those is close to meaningless on its own.
Where a source marks an alias as weak, we carry that marking into the result. Dropping it would convert the authority's own caveat into a claim we made.
What settles it
Identifying details do: date of birth, place of birth, nationality, passport or registration number, address. Those live in the authority's own entry, and that entry is the only authoritative version. Every result here links to the source and states which snapshot it came from and when that snapshot was published.
The quieter error
The dangerous mistake is not the false hit — that gets investigated. It is reading an empty result as a clearance.
An empty result means no match was found in the list versions checked, with the spelling used, at the time of the search. It does not mean a person or company is unrestricted, and this site never says that. Coverage is limited to the lists we have loaded, and a list is only as current as its last publication.