County officials are making it harder to search for property values using the county’s Web site, citing concerns about public safety.

The county’s Web site, www.douglas-county.com, no longer allows visitors to search for property values by typing in an owner’s name.

The decision to eliminate the name search — the simplest component of the Web site’s most popular feature — came after officials received a handful of complaints from people worried that the search subjected them to potential danger.

“We’d gotten some calls from individuals who were concerned they were in situations where they were afraid somebody might be tracking them or locating them when they didn’t want to be located — situations with messy divorces, where they had legitimate safety concerns,” said Craig Weinaug, county administrator, who made the decision to pull the search earlier this month.

“And that is public information. It’s still available at the courthouse, and we still give it out, but we felt like there were security concerns. We didn’t want to make it too easy for somebody to dig that (information) out if they were, say, searching at 1 in the morning from their house, because they were looking for someone.”

Weinaug said county officials consulted with leaders of the Lawrence Board of Realtors before shutting down the name search, which had allowed people to type in the name of a person or business and reveal all properties — with street addresses — owned by that person or business.

The ability to search by name still exists elsewhere on the Internet. The Journal-World’s own real estate site, hometown.lawrence.com, allows people to search by name or address, and has done so for years.

Weinaug said he’d received a few complaints in recent days that the county’s search had been limited. To find a property’s value, a person now must know one of three factors about the property: the street or street address, the plate number or the pin number.

6News video: County shuts down property value search by name Hometown Lawrence MLS online

He said anyone wanting to search values by name could stop by the appraiser’s office at the County Courthouse, 1100 Mass.

“There isn’t any question that it’s accessible information,” Weinaug said. “If somebody comes in and asks for it, we give it to them. … (But) one of our responsibilities is also to protect public safety.