BillTrack50 Help Center

For a reminder of the basics of searching, see this post. This post assumes you are already comfortable writing basic BillTrack50 queries and will focus on how to use the search options to create more complex searches.

First chose your state or states. Then, if you click on the line to Add Bill Text Search Condition you will see the available search options. It's a type of boolean search, using keywords and a combination of AND, OR and NOT to improve on standard keyword searching. When you are writing a query you can add two “all of” lines, two “near” lines, and two “any of” lines, if you need them.

This allows you to build complex queries. Let’s say I have a marijuana legalization topic in mind. I can enter Marijuana Marihuana Cannabis as an Any Of search and get bills with any of those words.

After those words are filled in I still have the option to add more search conditions. I’m going to choose a second Any Of box to narrow down to my topic, and search for any of license registration dispens*

This new search will give me any bill that has any of of the words from the first line AND any of the words from the second line. In other words a bill has to have at least one word from the first line AND ALSO has to have at least one word from the second line. Notice the label of the second line reminds you that there is an AND between these lines.

If you build a search with two all of boxes you will be getting an OR between your lines. So you could write a search for all of transgender athlete OR all of transgender collegiate sport*. Which means I would get bills that either contain the words transgender and athlete OR the bill has all of the words transgender and collegiate and sport*. Similarly I can have two “near” boxes now so I can have two lines that will look for marijuana near expungement OR marihuana near expungement.

You can also still mix and match. So if you have the two expungement lines above I can still add a third any of line to further narrow down to bills with marijuana expungement that also include any of juvenile “social equity”.

Finally, I added a none of line to make sure that bills that contain appropriation or appropriations will not show up, as I'm not interested in budget bills.

If you change your mind about a line you’ve added there is an x at the end to remove the line.

Committee Category Searching

You can further refine your search by filtering by a broad committee category. So, if I wanted to focus my search on medical marijuana, I could select the Health and Social Services category, which would eliminate bills of a more commercial nature which would be more likely to go to a Business and Industry type committee.