Congress.gov’s release 3.4 was deployed on Monday, June 26^th. With this new release, you may have noticed a change in your search results. This is because the default search operator on the global and advanced search form is now AND instead of OR.  For example, if you searched national park from the homepage, Congress.gov used to return results for national OR park. With the new release, Congress.gov will return results for the search national AND park.  The intent behind this change is to return results that contain both of your search terms, providing you with selections that are more relevant to your search. If you still want to use the OR operator, you can. All you need to do is type in the operator between the terms, e.g. national OR park. To learn more about Congress.gov search operators, please see our search tools page, and click on “search operators.”

The latest release also features enhancements to the legislation, nomination, and treaty document form filters. Please see the section below for a complete list of the enhancements included in the latest release.

If you have any questions, please use our Ask A Librarian form.

Enhancements – Search:

• Presumed AND for global and advanced search
  • Search < national park > from the homepage, and get 182 items (introduced prior to June 23, 2017) with the words “national” AND “park”, instead of about 2,578 items with “national” OR “park.”
• Legislation search form filters for Actions, Titles, and Summaries
• Nomination search form Date, Actions, Position, and Organization filters
• Treaty Document search form filters for Actions, Titles, Text of Resolution, and Index Terms
• Query Builder – text search box expands to support lengthy searches

Enhancements – Usability:

• Change “Facet” to “Filter”
• Print-friendly page scaling
• Print-friendly Amendment “All Information” pages