Word on the street is that Old Republic recently informed it's staff that they are moving title searching back to America from India.

While this seems to be initially encouraging, and is in some ways, it is also still a symptom of the ongoing lowering of standards that technology has allowed to occur.

There is no indication that they intend to stop skip-chaining title back to the last ensured transaction.  For quick review:  this is the practice of  searching back only as far as either their firm or another title company has previously ensured at loan or sale, relying on the prior ensurer to have properly researched further back.

In the rare case where title has never been insured and research must go back further, then local research will be necessary, but this is already the case.  India had records back to 1985;  the extent of the DataTree databases available, and older research was always necessary, even in an age where blanket exceptions could be inserted into a prelim as a matter of poor but minimal practice.

In essence, this is a money saving effort, as the "search" phase is all automated now, such that sending an APN overnight to India for a sweatshop worker to input the number in a computer and email results back, is a waste of time and cost.  New systems previewed by Fidelity over a year ago allow realty agents and brokers to do this online themselves;  auto-generating  prelims with blanket exceptions by having the computer do the skip chain.

Otherwise, the research is in the title mall's warehouse in the old records;  NOT farmed out to the abstract community, so don't get your hopes up for new work as a result of this.  Their overhead is lowered, but that money will certainly go to bonuses for administrators, not for more hires nor outsource to our community.