Justia beta Federal Register search site

Justia has announced a public beta of its Federal Register Rules and Regulations site, a (for now) free, specialized search engine for locating recent Federal Register notices, rules and proposed rules. A quick spin around the block with the optional “full text” search suggests that feature is not as helpful as it should be. As far as I can tell, there is no real search syntax. Every keyword entered seems to be treated as having an AND connector, regardless of other search syntax conventions, e.g., putting the words in quotes, inserting a plus or minus sign, etc. The keywords you do enter, however, are shown bold in the search results, which is helpful. This new search site has other features that are more helpful and better implemented: You can drill down by federal agency and sub-agency (e.g., Department of Agriculture -> Food and Nutrition Service) and then do a search for recently published items within that particular agency subset, within a specific set of dates, and limited to only notices, rules and/or proposed rules. Plus, once you find the type of search results that you want, you can then subscribe to that particular search result using the RSS feed displayed with the search result. That is, if you can get the feed to work. When I clicked on the RSS feed button for this sample search of recently published Food Stamp rules (illustrated below), the feed results opened up in a FireFox window, but I couldn’t get the same feed to work either in FeedDemon or as FireFox Live Bookmark. Your feed mileage may vary.

UPDATE:

Here’s a sample search of recently published Food Stamp rules, illustrated below.

Within minutes of my initial post, I heard from Nicholas Moline, a programmer at Justia, who quite properly corrected me on how the keyword connectors work, and provided other clarification about how its beta Federal Register search works: “We are still working on the full text search to bring in the abilities to put in your own search criteria, however I did want to let you know that it does indeed use AND, not OR if you enter in multiple words. We do however have simple English stemming on words, so your search for food stamps also brought in stamp, and stamping, which appear in the first several documents in your search result. I am hoping to have phrase capabilities and search criteria implemented soon.”

Nicholas also fixed the apparent feed problem I reported, and now it seems to be working just fine both in FeedDemon and FireFox Live Bookmarks. Hence, the strike outs, above. You gotta give ‘em props for jumpin’ on it immediately!