US Congress unveils New Beta Legislative Search Engine

US Congress has announced the launch of a new search engine which will be made available from Wednesday onwards. The beta search engine can be reached at Congress.gov.

The search engine is still in its beta stages and is expected to help politicians, researchers, students, lobbyists and other common citizens to understand the process of legislations and passing of law through the House and Senate in a better fashion. The Congress Library stated that the new beta website will eventually replace THOMAS legislative search system after a year of co-existence.

The new website has enough resemblance with Google Search Engine and has a single box for entering the data. The search results can be filtered on the basis of categories.

The search results can be narrowed respectively on the basis of:

• Year


• Subject


• House


• Senate


• Others

THOMAS search system was launched in 1995 at a time when Internet was at a stage of infancy across the world. Jim Karamanis, The Library’s Chief of Web Services was stated as saying before testing the new site, “It’s like comparing a tricycle to a Cadillac”. Designers of the new search engine claim that it is designed more intuitively. Reports suggest that search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing will also have the ability to retrieve information from the website.