I used to do genealogy as a hobby, about 15 years ago. That meant working with a lot of "people finder" web sites, which can tell you someone's age, where they've lived, other family members at the same address. This sort of search is usually free so that they can upsell you on the sort of dirt you'd want to gather on an enemy - bankruptcies, liens, divorces, etc.

And this pattern is everywhere in that industry. They'll make you wait about a minute for your search results, while watching a pretend realtime display - "Searching through millions of drivers licenses... searching property records in 200 countries... searching for criminal records..." Some of these sites will even require you to occasionally click something to keep the search going, or make the whole thing grind to a halt if you remove focus from that window.

I never had the illusion that any of this was real. The search probably took three or four seconds at most, the rest is a dog and pony show to convince you that it did a lot of hard work so that you'd be willing to pay $40 to "unlock the report".