Written by: Karen Suhaka | February 13, 2014

We are pleased to introduce a new way to search on BillTrack50. In addition to being able to search for phrases by “enclosing search terms in quotes”, you can now search for words near other words, but not necessarily right together or in a particular order.

Near searches assess bills based on how often your search terms appear and how close they are to each other relative to the bill length.  This is a great way to see only the most relevant bills for a particular set of search terms.  Here’s some example results to give you the idea of when each kind of search is relevant:
security AND breach -> 742 results
security NEAR breach -> 147
“security breach” -> 52
sex AND discrimination -> 562
sex NEAR discrimination -> 185
“sex discrimination” -> 39
ethics AND lobbying -> 141
ethics NEAR lobbying -> 24
“ethics lobbying” OR “lobbying ethics” -> 3

 

You will find the new Near search type in the search type drop down box:

Quick Search Screen Shot

 

Searching “near” works much the same for bill sheets. Simply change “all of” to “near”:

 

 

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.