Board Releases New Features for Recovery.gov

While the entire rest of the fiscal policy world is obsessing about the budget [1], I thought I'd take a minute to talk about the other major event of the week, the release of the second round [2] of Recovery Act recipient reporting. We're still working on sifting through the reports themselves, but the website, Recovery.gov [3], also received an overhaul [4] this weekend. While many of the site's new features still have a long way to go, it's encouraging to see the Recovery Board, which is responsible for the site, actively working to improve the website, despite the fact that public attention has largely moved on.

The most significant change to the website is a new advanced search [5] function. While it is hard to find, the new search is a drastic improvement over the regular search. The regular search, which is accessed through a search box at the top of all pages, simply returns "Google-style" search results. Type in "Boeing [6]" for instance, and you get a link to every page on the site (or every recipient report) which mentions "Boeing" somewhere on the page. It could be a town, a company, or a project; users can't narrow their search in any way. It's also next to impossible to tell which of the results has the piece of information a user is looking for.

The advanced search is better in two respects. First, users can narrow their search parameters, meaning that if a user wanted to find contracts Boeing received in California, they can do so [7] with one, simple search instead of having to hunt through dozens of search results. This narrowing of parameters is very useful in making searches more fruitful.

Second, and more importantly, the advanced search results are now returned in a different format. Instead of the "Google-style" results, it now returns transaction-based results, with each record displayed by organization name, award number, awarding agency, award amount, etc. And each column is sortable, so even if a search returns hundreds of entries, it is very easy to find the one entry in question. To demonstrate the difference between old and new, I pasted below the old results (top), and the new results (bottom). The new version is clearly better at showing results in a meaningful way, presenting the information users are looking for in a cleaner, more accessible fashion. Sure, it's mostly a formatting change, but it's an important change.

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This isn't to say that the new advanced search is perfect. It still has some flaws. The advanced search is almost impossible to find. For some reason, some transactions are shown twice in search results. Users can't download their search results. Clicking on an organization's name won't bring up information about them (for instance, a summary of all contracts that organization received). But despite these flaws, the Recovery Board would do well to consider making the advanced search the default recipient search. (For more ways in which the site's search abilities could be improved, check out our Recovery Act data site, Fedspending.org's [10] Recovery Act tab [11].)

The other new features are not nearly as good. There's a job search feature [12], but it pales in comparison to plenty of widely known, free job search engines such as Monster.com, which has the added ability to search for jobs by location. Then there's the new "diversity" map [13], which aims to show how Recovery Act funds are distributed by race and is completely incomprehensible. I think the map shows communities with high minority-to-Recovery-Act-funding ratios, but I have no idea, since the map doesn't come with a legend. Both of these features, the job search and the new maps, have good intentions, and have the potential to be powerful tools, but probably need a little more time on the drawing board.

All in all, it's good to see the Board working to improve Recovery.gov. There is still much that can be done to make Recovery.gov a model for spending transparency, but the Board is at least demonstrating a will to move towards that goal.