A First Look at Search

Ryan Pivovar / July 24, 2023

The site is starting to take shape as users are now able to search for any congressmember and see their complete voting records. We believe that finding a congressmember's voting records is now faster and easier on our site than anywhere else on the internet.

gif of what it looks like to search on our site

We've also hit a few other important milestones this past month:

We've now collected roughly 2 million individual voting records from both the House and the Senate. Most of this data is live on the site. Some of these voting records go as far back as 2016, and some are as recent as just a few weeks ago.
All active U.S. House of Representatives members have voting records on their profile pages now.
We recently started collecting U.S. senators' voting records. Some of these voting records have now made it on to the site. By next month, all current senators' profile pages will have voting records.
We've greatly improved the mobile experience. Each page now has a dedicated mobile version that looks great on phones. Profile pages have improved the most. Below is an example showing what it's like to scroll through voting records on a phone.

gif of scrolling through voting records on the phone

In the next month, we have several big things planned:

We're going to give each U.S. congressional bill its own page, and we'll make these bills searchable. Additionally, we'll link all voting records to their respective bills so that users can start making associations between congressmembers and where they stand on bills.

We're also going to start extracting keywords from each bill using natural language processing. We've successfully experimented with this previously, and we're now in a place where we can start doing this at scale. Each bill on our site will have a list of attached keywords which will help users identify what exactly the bill is about.

We're going to add a list of "in-progress" bills to the home page. These are bills that are still in the process of being voted on. Bills often have many rounds of votes, each vote taking in different considerations for the bill. The lifespan of a bill can be quite long, and we want users to be able to "check in" on this process. We want to make it very easy for users to reach out to their congressmembers and voice their opinion about any given bill.

We're not done with search yet, either. We're going to build out a dedicated search results page. This page will provide a more comprehensive list based on the user's search query. Currently, search results are confined to just the search dropdown box.

Lastly, we're going to continue our efforts to populate all profile pages with a Creative Commons-licensed image of the congressmember. Every profile page will eventually have a picture of the person that belongs to the profile page.

So, what do you think? Do you have any suggestions or questions for how we're implementing search? Please give us your feedback at the form here.

- Ryan