Investors are spending more time checking on the backgrounds of the financial types who pitch for their business, and that — mostly — is a good thing.

The public used a regulatory database to check the records of 14.2 million stockbrokers and advisers last year, according to the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, known as Finra, a self-regulatory group that’s financed by Wall Street. That’s more than double the 6.7 million searches in 2007, the year before the financial crisis began.

Nothing wrong with investors getting more vigilant, of course. But there are some important caveats about what investors get when they check in with a broker-vetting site.

Finra’s records don’t include lawsuits against brokers that aren’t considered “investment-related.” That means that a lot of brokers who are exposed to the possibility of big judgments have official records that say nothing about that exposure.

And then there’s the issue of the freebie websites popping up to help investors vet brokers. Check the fine print, and you learn that some of those sites get their revenues from advisors who pay to be featured. If you get it for free, and the broker pays to get his or her name in front of you on the site, can it really be investor-friendly?

I took a look at the broker background-checking business in my latest column for Bloomberg View. Read article.