Building a search on BillTrack50 is fairly straightforward, however it isn’t exactly like doing a Google search. So there’s a few things you need to keep in mind, which I’ll explain in this post. There’s also a few tips and tricks advanced users might find useful. Any bills that are introduced later and meet your search terms will be automatically added to your bill sheet (if you made a bill sheet).
Here is an example search for us to discuss:
All of, Any of, None of
Most searches are built by putting words or phrases into the search boxes. The key idea is to enter words that would actually appear in the bill you are searching for. So if you are looking for drug bills, “medical marijuana” is a good search term, but “legislation about drugs” is not. You don’t need to enter commas, or the word “and” or “or”. Just words. We ignore punctuation and simple small words, so it doesn’t hurt anything to have in your search, but you might as well skip them.
Finally, phrases need to be in quotes, if you are searching for the whole phrase, such as “controlled substances” in the example above. If you don’t have the quote then we consider the words individually, by the rules described below.
Contains all of: means all words or phrases you enter in this box must appear in the bill. In our example above only bills with the word “marijuana” will be included, regardless of how many of the other words the bill contains. If there were two words in this box, both words would need to be in the bill for it to be included in the results.
Contains any of: if any of the words or phrases you enter in this box are in the bill, that’s good enough. You can enter synonyms here, or expand on word(s) you put in the ‘all of’ box (as in our example). Or you can define a group of bills that are more loosely related — or not at all related.
Contains none of: if a bill contains the words or phrases you enter in this box, it will not be included in your results. Use this box to exclude whole groups of bills. If your topic overlaps another topic, excluding words can be a good way to sort out the bills you want from the bills you don’t want. You can also remove any individual bill from your results using the “x” in the first column of the resulting bill sheet. But the ‘none of’ box can be a good way to exclude a bunch of bills at once.
Wildcards
Our wildcard character is an asterisk: *. You can only use a wildcard at the end of a word. So to find cannabis, cannabinoid, or some variant, you can enter “cannab*”, as in the example above. You must enter at least four letters before the asterisk. We have this limit to keep results to a reasonable size. You also must put quotes around the word or phrase using a wildcard. You can use the wild card in any of the boxes.
Bill Numbers
You can also use the search boxes to search by bill number. You can add bill numbers using the Include Bill by State Bill Number tool at the bottom of the search screen: click on the plus, add the two letter state abbreviation and a space, then pause to let the drop down populate. This will show you the format for bill numbers in that state. Then you can keep typing and the drop down will continue to narrow. You can add as many individual bill numbers as you like this way.
However, you can also enter bill numbers into the search boxes. You still need to have a rough idea of how the bill numbers are formatted for your target state, however. So try using the find bill number drop down as a cheat sheet if you aren’t getting the results you expect. If you are entering more than one bill number be sure to use the ‘any of’ box.
If you want a bill sheet with just a specific list of bills, building it is a two step process. First, build the bill sheet using any old word as your search term. After you’ve built the bill sheet, go to the query tab and add your bill numbers. Then you can remove the fake search term you entered to build the sheet. Note that this bill sheet will not have any new bills added automatically – it will always be just the bill numbers you asked for.
All Bills in a State
We require you to fill in at least one of the criteria on the screen to narrow your query before you run the search. This requirement is to keep the results from being too large. However, if you are in a state that doesn’t have too many bills (a few thousand or less), you might reasonably want to get all the bills back for that state. Or set up alerts to be emailed new bills as they are introduced. The easiest way to do this is simply search on the full state name (eg Wyoming) in the all of box.
Keywords
If you are making a bill sheet that explores a topic new to you, start by entering the most obvious words. Run your search, and look at the results to find inspiration for more words to include in the ‘any of ‘box. You can also turn on the keyword column for suggestions of words commonly found in the bills you are considering. To see keywords you need to turn on the keyword column: open the bill sheet settings panel (the little gear icon at the bottom of the bill sheet), and check the box to show the keywords column. Keywords can also suggest terms you might want to exclude using the ‘none of’ box.
Other Search Tools
The other search items, such as the state list, legislator, or passed flag, all continue to narrow your query. So if you enter some search terms, and pick a legislator, you will see bills that have those terms AND are sponsored by that legislator. The exception is the bill number, which adds those bills regardless of your other search terms.
You can always reach out to us in email, on our contact form, or give us a call if you’d like some help or are have suggestions for how to make the search tools more useful. You can also find some more hints in this quick video tutorial.
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.