There are five ways to search CongressNow articles, including by Date, Search Type, Subject, Author, and Text Searching. You may use one or more of these options.

If you select more than one option, the search will return articles where all selected criteria are present. In other words, if you search for the term ‘superfund’ and select Geof Koss as the author, you will only see articles written by Geof Koss and containing the term ‘superfund’.

CongressNow is not Congress-specific in terms of date searching, which means you can search across multiple years and Congresses. Simply put in your start and end dates using a mm/dd/yyyy format.

Leaving the Start and End boxes blank will default to all CongressNow stories since the publication began in March 2007.

There are three types of documents on CongressNow: Issue articles, Latest News articles and Markups, as follows:

• Issue: Articles that were published in the 2:30 edition each day
• Latest News: Articles that were posted after the 2:30 edition had already been published
• Markups: Articles that specifically covered committee markup hearings. These markups will include amendment descriptions and recorded votes on amendments.

CongressNow stories are associated with legislative issue areas. This option allows you to limit your search hits to a specific area of interest.

Search only for stories written by a particular CongressNow reporter.

• Connectors for keywords/phrases
  
  and, or, but not, within
  
  
• Special characters
  
  *  (allows for truncation, i.e. web* will find web, webs, webbing, etc.)
  "   (used to open and close phrases)
  &  (short-hand for AND)
  |   (short-hand for OR)
  ~  (short-hand for BUT NOT)
  ()  (opens/closes a nested clause, supports multi-level nesting
  []  (used by the WITHIN operator, see above)
  
  
• Sample searches
  
  web and site
  - finds all text containing "web" and "site".
  
  "web and site"
  - finds all text containing the phrase "web and site".
  
  "web site hosting"
  - finds all text containing this phrase
  
  (web or www) and site
  - text must contain "site" and either "web" or "www".
  
  within 25 [web] [site]
  - finds all text containing "web" and "site" within 25 characters of each other.
  
  within 500 [web,www] [site,order,online][computer]
  - finds all text containing at least one word from each grouping within 500 characters of any word in all other groupings.
  
  (("web design" or "computer") and art) and within 25 [web,www] [site]
  - find all text which contains "web" OR "www" within 25 spaces of "site" AND contains "art" AND contains "web design" OR "computer"
  
  

To save a search for future use, simply type a name for the search in the box under the heading “WOULD YOU LIKE TO SAVE THIS SEARCH?” and then click SAVE.

In the future, you can re-use your Saved Search by highlight the name of the search in the list of SAVED SEARCHES and clicking the ‘Retrieve’ button. The page will reload and the search filters will contain the elements of your original search.

For additional assistance in using CongressNow, please call 202/824-6800 or e-mail support@congressnow.