Some examples of critical exhaustive searches are: the search of a fraud file in a high-risk financial transaction; top level security clearance for government; a border control search of a high-risk person alert list.

Typical characteristics of such searches are:

A critical exhaustive search must also be able to find identities, which have been deliberately manipulated to defeat the system while still retaining enough similarity to be explained as mistakes. It will need to succeed despite the country of origin of the identity. To do this, the critical exhaustive search must work harder and look deeper. It will also benefit from working more intelligently.

Quality and performance will improve the more that is known about patterns used to manipulate identity data. Quality will improve the more identification attributes are available for matching. Attributes with null values may need to be considered close to a match.

Because there will be more candidates on average returned from a search, maximizing the true matches and minimizing the false becomes harder. In many cases the computer system alone cannot make the choice "is this a match". The system’s success is measured by how well it assists the user to make this choice.