Find Bills Faster With GovTrack's Advanced Bill Search

From:  New: Faceted Bill Search  |  By Josh Tauberer  |  GovTrack

• GovTrack 2.0 has an advanced bill search, which you can find in Browse => Bills => Search & Track => Advanced Search.

• The advanced search — or in technical jargon the “faceted” search — can be used to drill-down into all of the bills that are currently before the U.S. Congress or actually any bill introduced since 1973. Besides searching bill titles, you can narrow your search using a number of other filters. What’s really cool is that the filters change as you drill-down so that you can find the available choices quickly.

• The filters in advanced search are: when the bill was introduced, who sponsored it, its current status in the legislative process, its subject area, and the bill’s type (e.g. bill versus resolution). You can also sort the results by the bill’s most recent status change date, by its date of introduction, or by its relevancy to a title text search.

• Bill information on GovTrack typically runs one or two days behind. Congress’s parliamentary procedure is pretty complex, so if you hover your mouse over any of the status options you’ll get a little explanatory text for it.