its useful for putting in a serial and seeing if the guitar listed is the same as the one in your hand or being sold to you, absence of evidence doesn't mean its wrong, it just means its not listed. The point being its good for checking the serial and seeing what it says, i've bought 5 fender guitars second hand and they were all on it, a 2011, a 2013, 2014, 2019 and a 2020. I didn't buy two others because the serials refered to different guitars that had been broken down for parts and the seller had bought them not knowing. More on reddit.com

There is a tool to look up serial numbers, but it's old and does not work with every serial number. It's at http://www.guitardaterproject.org/ibanez.aspx Otherwise, I just use the Wiki to decipher serial numbers. For the example you provided, if an Ibanez Serial number starts with an "I", it's usually safe to assume it was manufactured in Indonesia , keep in mind that you will usually see a "Made in" tag somewhere near the serial number to make it better to understand where to start your search as well. From there, you can look at the number of digits of the serial number. Your example has nine digits following the I, so ten in total. This means that the best fit for this serial number would be in the 2001-present format of serial numbers. So with these we use the following logic: 1st Digit = The factory code (Where it was made) 2nd & 3rd Digits = The year the guitar was made 4th & 5th Digits = The month of manufacture Digits 6-10 = the consecutive production number for the year of production from that specific factory. If we take your example and follow the code logic for that specific serial number format we will know that the guitar is made in the Cort Guitar factory in Indonesia in January of 2019, and that it was the 12,823rd guitar manufactured that fiscal year. Now say if you had a completely different serial number, you can try the serial lookup site. I can use my Prestige RG as an example which has a serial number of F1827851. My Prestige says it's "Made in Japan", so we start in the Japanese section of the serial numbers in the Wiki. My serial being 8 digits in total can help me narrow down which specific serial format to use and the fact that it starts with the letter F helps even further to narrow it down to a Fujigen made guitar, which uses two formats of this many digits. So first we can disregard the F as we already know that it now means it was manufactured in the Fujigen factory in Japan, now to figure out how to further decipher which of the remaining two formats it belongs to. Luckily it's pretty straightforward with these Fujigen serial numbers. After F we have a two digit year code, my number is 18, so we now know that it was made in 2018, narrowing it down to the November 2004–present Fujigen serial number format. With this knowledge, we can use the rest of the number to decipher the month of production, and the production order for that month. My numbers are 27851. According to the Wiki, that means that this guitar was made in August and was the 851st guitar made that month. Hope that helps you a bit, and sorry if this got a bit long and confusing. More on reddit.com

I have put together a collection of serial number info that includes most major electric guitar makers in one place. I originally did it for personal use so I wouldn't have to cruise the web each time I had a new (used) guitar to date, but decided to post it to my website and see if it might turn... More on hamerfanclub.com

I found this Guitar Info Your guitar was made at the Corona Plant (Fender), USA in 2000 - 2001 Production Number: 128001 More on reddit.com