Searching by Word/Phrase in Bills

SEARCHING BY WORD/PHRASE IN BILLS

ADVANCED SEARCH: Use of Native InQuery: Structured Searches
(Examples of Boolean, Proximity and Fielded Searches)

QUICK GUIDE
To search by word/phrase, simply type your search word(s) or phrase into the search box, e.g.

hazardous materials transportation

The InQuery search system brings back results in relevance-ranked order based on the search words entered. For more comprehensive retrieval, you may do an additional search on synonymous terms or phrases. For example, the search

capital punishment

would bring to the top of the results list bills containing that phrase, but not bills which referred to this concept only as the "death penalty." To find additional relevant items, perform another search on

death penalty

By default, the search you type into the search box will be run against the text of all bills in the database for that Congress.

LIMIT BY
By default, the search you type into the search box will be run against the text of all bills in the database for that Congress. However, you may elect to limit your search to the text of House or Senate bills, and to bills for which floor action has occurred, or to the text of enrolled bills, by selecting the appropriate radio buttons under the Limit by option.

WORD/PHRASE SEARCH

Exact Word Search - Word-Variants Search

Exact-Word Search: When you do a word/phrase search in the Bill Text query page, the default is to search for the exact words typed into the search box.

Four sets of results are given for an exact-word search in Bill Text:

Bills containing your exact phrase.

Bills containing all your search terms near each other in any order.

Bills containing all your search terms but not near each other.

Bills containing one or more of your search terms.

Results do not overlap. Items which are selected based on containing the exact phrase are not included in the grouping of legislation containing all search terms.

Higher recall precision comes from including additional search terms or a longer phrase. For example, the search

balanced budget amendment

will return a more focused set of results than

balanced budget

Word-Variants Search: Although an exact-word search is the default search in the Bill Text files, you can also do a broader search by selecting the radio button Search for word variants. A search done with the word-variants radio button selected will bring back bills with your exact word, but also bills with variants on the word, including plurals. A search on multiple words with bring back bills with the phrase, or variants of its words, in the same order.

For example, a search on

citizen

would bring back bills with any of the words citizen, citizens, citizenry, citizenship.

A search on:

child health care

would also return bills with the phrase children's health care.

An alternative way to perform a word-variant search is to use the right-hand truncation feature. The truncation symbol is * and it is a "wildcard" character, which can represent one or more characters. For example, a search on:

medica* fund*

might (depending on the content of bills in the database) bring back bills containing the phrase medicare funds, medicare funding, medicaid funds, medicaid funding, medical funds, medical funding, and so forth. The use of the right-hand truncation feature will override any exact-word search, even if the exact-word radio button is selected.

NUMBER OF BILLS TO BE RETRIEVED
The Bills Text search form comes preset with 50 as the default number of bills to be retrieved from any search. This number results in a fast response time for your search. Typing a higher number in the "Number of Bills to be Retrieved" box will result in a larger results set. However, since the InQuery search system works on a relevance-ranking algorithm, listing the bills in decreasing order of relevance to your search, the last bills on the list may not be as relevant.

In addition, a request for a large number of bills will slow retrieval time.

BROWSE
By selecting the link entitled "All Bills This Congress by Bill Number and Type," you may also elect to "browse" a sequential numerical listing of bills by bill type. Because House bills (H.R.) and Senate bills (S.) are the most numerous, they are presented in ranges of 100 bills. After viewing the records for 100 of the same type of bill, you can continue viewing the next group of 100 by pressing the Forward button at the bottom of the page.

For an explanation of search results, including bill versions, see Interpreting Search Results.

For an explanation of relevance-ranking in the search InQuery search system, see InQuery and Relevance-Ranking.

LARGE BILLS
Our current search system has a tendency to prefer small records. This is a result of our implementation of the relevance ranking search paradigm. For example, given the search terms

child health care education

THOMAS will score a 125-word bill that mentions this phrase "higher" (closer to the top of the results list) than a 350K word bill that also discusses this term. Briefly, this is because 4/125 is greater than 4/350,000. Consequently, highly ranked results for many searches are often "short" bills. However, legislation length is unpredictable, and often important bills, e.g. appropriations bills, are quite long. We are working on improving this aspect of THOMAS.

CUSTOM RESULTS-SET SIZE
Advanced users may edit a local copy of the Bill Text, assigning the "Number of Bills to be Retrieved ("MaxDocs") name/value pair a different value. The HTML syntax and punctuation are quite unforgiving. See Direct Links To THOMAS Documents for related information.

Searches using a local copy of the search form that are sent to THOMAS will be evaluated in turn.

Please be aware that larger values will degrade system performance. We may have to impose a system limit on the range of values for maximum number of bills to be retrieved.

Your search totals will vary from your requested MaxDocs value because final results are culled from multiple search criteria.