Would a "bot approach" to searching these records work? Say you were looking for (to use the article's example) a 9-mm semi-automatic Beretta 92 sold at Annie'

Would a "bot approach" to searching these records work? Say you were looking for (to use the article's example) a 9-mm semi-automatic Beretta 92 sold at Annie's Get Your Gun, serial number ABC123. You have the scans of all the Form 4473s put into folders (or maybe not, maybe just everything in a dump), and tell the bot to go looking for any form that matches this pattern. Importantly, the bot would NOT cache or structure data for later lookups; every search would be virgin. You'd have a lot of false positives (the O 0 and I 1 problem), it would not be terribly helpful at handwritten forms, but it could reduce a pile of a million records down to, hopefully, a few hundred or thousand.