It's not going to be easy to perform free online criminal record checks, and yes, you are correct, most of the websites advertising free criminal record checks on Google are anything but free. It would be nice if they were upfront about this ...
However, I do understand why it's difficult to search criminal records for free online, this is because a lot of cost and time goes into uploading the information online - and this is usually done by private companies, who then charge for the convenience they provide.
I perform online criminal record checks myself (and other records checks) and when I do I prefer to use the private companies. They extract information from many different sources and so I stand a much better chance of getting complete and accurate information .
If I attempted to manually search for this myself, it would take many hours, lot's of driving to government buildings, and waiting in queues, and probably I would still have to pay a fee anyway - plus, the likelihood that the information would be incomplete and/or inaccurate would be greater.
For this reason most people prefer to pay for online criminal record checks , compared to the alternative, it's much less hassle, quicker and a lot cheaper in the long run.
The guys I use are Gov criminal check resources , from past experiences they seem to be the best, that is to say, they have one of the largest source of information, plus they are very fast and the reports supplied are complete.
I hope that helped clear up the free online criminal record checks debate! :-)
All the best and good luck with the searches.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------