Robert shared the news about our first release in April, which included enhancing the search result sorting. With this release, we add some additional new features for alerts, such as the ability to edit and change your saved search. One goal we have is to provide you with timely legislative information. Another alert enhancement is that rather than just the alerts in the morning, there will also be an afternoon alert if anything has been updated since your morning alert.
The Search Alert Project is a multi-phase project to enhance Congress.gov saved search alert functionality to include features of LIS.gov alert functionality, in preparation for LIS.gov retirement.
Congress.gov account holders who have subscribed to alerts for saved searches now receive alert emails in the afternoon in addition to the morning.
Afternoon alerts detail changes to saved search results since the morning alerts. They do not duplicate information sent in the morning.
On Congress.gov account Saved Searches pages, searches now appear with an Edit Search option in addition to previously available options such as Run Search, Delete Search, and Get Alerts.
Selecting Edit Search displays the search criteria in the search form from which the search was saved.
For searches saved from the global search, Edit Search displays the search criteria in the search bar.
Users may edit search criteria and save to overwrite and update a saved search.
Enhancement – Filter and Sort Legislation Text Search Results
Users may filter and sort search results retrieved using the Legislation Text search form with the “Allow quotes and Boolean operators” option selected.
Users may filter results by Congress, Bill Text Type, and Chamber of Origin.
Users may sort results by Relevancy, Date, Bill Number – Ascending, and Bill Number – Descending.
Examples –
Use the filters to refine a search across Congresses for legislation text containing “vote registration”~5 or “vote rights”~5 to see only items that were introduced in the House in the 114th Congress. (Select Show Filters to the left of the search results to view filter selections.)
As part of the most recent Congress.gov release, inactive congressional committee profile pages show a committee’s status as Terminated and the years when a committee was active.
Visit the Committee Name History finding aid for links to the profile pages of additional inactive committees that interact with Congress.gov data sets.
Inactive Committee Profile Pages
Top 10
Below are the Most-Viewed Bills for April 15, 2018. All are from the current Congress.