We’ve made several improvements over the summer, both to the website and to the data.
New Quick Search
The most visible change is to our quick search screen. We simplified it to one search box, which you can toggle between “all of”, the most common search, and “any of”. You can put bill numbers right in the search box, if you know exactly what you are looking for. All the same searching things still apply, the wildcard is *, phrases go in quotes, and you are entering words that you expect to appear in your bills of interest.
We also made some other smaller changes, streamlining the initial home screen, among other things, which you may notice.
Additional Track Bill Buttons
We’ve added a lot more ways for you to add a bill to a specific bill sheet, making it much easier to create a “hot list” of bills you are especially interested in (hot lists are great for widgets, for example). In addition to moving the track button on the bill sheet so that you can access it from any tab, we’ve added a “+” to the first column in the bill sheet itself, so you can simply cherry pick the bills you want to add to your hot list. We also added a “+” to the list of bills a legislator has sponsored on our legislator pages.
Washington DC
Our database now includes bills from Washington DC. You can search from them using the state code DC, and they will show up when you do an “all states” search. Right now we only have bills from the 2013 session.
Amendment Tracking
We’ve added additional data to track proposed amendments to a bill, particularly in Florida, but also for several other states, with more states rolling out soon. We will not be providing the full bill text for proposed amendments until they are accepted, however we will add an action when amendments are proposed, whether or not they are accepted. So you can now simply add an alert to actions if you would like to be notified whenever an amendment is introduced.
API
Our API has been released. Please contact us for details, documentation, and a key.
The Future
We have a few more improvements we still hope to roll out before the new sessions get started. We plan on adding bill sheet sharing, so you can allow others to access and edit your bill sheets. We are also working on adding “near” as a search option. Finally we hope to get the Virgin Islands added to our database, though that may not happen until later in 2014.
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.