We introduced several new features over the summer, and I’m happy to announce one more: saving a quick search.
Quick searches have two distinguishing features. First, they are free for everyone for unlimited searches. All you need to do to access the quick search tool is register for a free account, and you’re good to go. The quick search will only return 200 bills at a time, but you can do as many searches as you like, as often as you like, and read as many bill and legislator histories as you like.
Second, quick searches are, well, quick. We’ve recently overhauled the quick search to be even quicker and easier to use, making it even faster to just dive in and find bills you might care about. Just type in some words that would appear in the bills you are interested in, or put in a bill number, and off you go.
Bill sheets, on the other hand, are a paid service. A bill sheet is essentially a saved search. Once you’ve saved your search you can access some additional features, like setting up alerts when a new bill is introduced that meets your search criteria, or when a bill you are following gets voted on. You can also share bills you’ve identified in your bill sheet using our widgets or stakeholder pages.per
So when might you save a quick search? If you find yourself coming back periodically and running the same search over and over to see if anything has changed, you might want to consider saving the search and setting up an alert, to save you that time and effort and to make sure you don’t miss anything.
Another reason to save a quick search might be that you want to share a group of bills with others. It’s already easy to share a single bill, just share the URL to the bill on facebook, twitter, in your blog, wherever, and it will always go to the current version of the bill. Anyone clicking on the link will go straight to the bill (or legislator) without being asked to log in, which makes it really easy for your readers to use. But if you want to share a group of bills then saving a search so you can set up a widget is a nice option, because then we automatically keep the bill status updated for you in the widget.
Saving a quick search will start a subscription, and show you your pricing options as part of the process. A subscription for one search is $500/year, which gives you access to all the tools discussed. You can get unlimited searches for $3000/year.
What about if you are a paying customer? How does the ability to save a quick search help you? The new streamlined search gives you a nice fast way to try out some search terms without going through the process of establishing a bill sheet. If you uncover something you would like to track then you can save the search, and establish your bill sheet. Quick search is also a great way to find a single bill if you already know the bill number, and then you can use the track button on the Bill Detail page to add that bill to one of your existing bill sheets, or save the quick search to establish a new bill sheet.
Hopefully you find this new feature helpful! Let us know what else we can work on to make BillTrack50 as useful as possible to you.
About BillTrack50 – BillTrack50 is a user friendly free service that provides legislation research in all 50 states and federally. BillTrack50 also offers legislation and regulation tracking across the nation with tools to help organization stay on top of changes (bill sheets and alerts) and share legislation they are tracking with key stakeholders (legislator scorecards, widgets and stakeholder pages). If you are interested in learning more about how BillTrack50 saves organizations time and money, sign up for a demo and try it out BillTrack50 Pro for a month, for free.