The release of the Contract Opportunities search function at www.beta.sam.gov occurred on November 12, 2019 to replace the prior portal at www.fbo.gov (FBO) in a step to combine multiple Federal Government Procurement websites into a singular point of entry. While I am still getting used to the new website and acclimated to the new functions as compared to the FBO website that I have come to the conclusion that it is not quite ready for prime time. The new website appears to have gone to a filtering capability and away from an actual search platform. I am not going into any of the decision-making process for this change since I am not privy to this information but coming to this post with an end user mindset. I have many years of search experience using various open source Federal Government procurement websites, such as fbo.gov and FPDS-NG.gov, as well as a proprietary online search and Business Development website. Overall, the redesign has made accessing the expected search results and data more difficult which is the opposite result that should occur when redesigning a data driven website. I do hope that this is not the intended end result but just a temporary first step towards something greater and more useful.
The change to the filter model has made it more difficult to hone into a specific result with keyword filters (searches). The “and” filter (search) seems to have been completely removed/ignored in the Keyword and Title search fields (more on another dislike on the Title field later). When performing a keyword filter, the relevant opportunities will appear at the top of the filter result list in which the user can sort in ascending or descending order by either Title or Last Updated Date Sort By categories. However, searching on multiple keywords to find both of them in the same opportunity will result in many more opportunities that do not contain both, such as performing a search on “protective security officer” AND “south Texas area”. This search example should result in multiple results with those two specific keyword strings. But the end result is the inclusion of other similar opportunities, which may have one or the other keyword but not necessarily both, thus burying the opportunities containing the helpful and desired information. While the initial result in the results list is for Protective Security Officer – South Texas Area, the following opportunities revolve around South Pacific, Nevada, and South Carolina which are irrelevant opportunities when looking at the search string. The total number of opportunities in the filter is 23,212 at the time of this writing. This is an important piece of information since when I remove the checkmark next to Active Only function, in order to tie the current opportunity with any historically released information, the results are more difficult to identify with the greater amount of posted results. This search issue becomes more apparent when searching on keywords that are vague in nature. Another example of this behavior is to search on the keyword string “mega matoc” and sacramento (with the Active Only filter unchecked). This search will result in 8,378 opportunities at the time of this writing. One can search on a single keyword phrase in the Title field, such as “Mega Matoc”, and a singular opportunity will result. However, the usefulness of this is limited. My reasoning is that this is usually a second search of mine and I am looking for other related historical postings in order to find any information that may lead me to identify the original and current opportunity’s incumbent. While technically, the search did work by bringing the one result, it isn’t really useful due to the fact the opportunity names can and do change. Bringing a limited result using a keyword search but greater than a singular result from the title search, having a “and” search in the keyword field would help in showing results to identify specific criteria such as a solicitation number and then use in other databases to find other information such as incumbent information. Notice in the following screen shot. that the keywords that were entered as an and search string is changed to remove the “and” filter and is now simply an “or” filter.
Contract Opportunities at beta.sam.gov has gone further to make accessing the information harder by two methods in my month of use. First, Contract Opportunities eliminated the ability to display additional results. In the www.fbo.gov, the user was able to choose from a range of results in terms of numbers, with the largest amount was 100 opportunities. In the Contracting Opportunities there is no such function so you are limited to 10 opportunities at a time. Again, performing results with vague information (which may be the only info you know) is much more laborious. Taking the 23,212 total filtered results, one has to constantly scroll to the bottom of the website page to click on the next page or next arrow in order to get to the next 10. Secondly, the Clear All button is located at the bottom of the filter fields. Anytime, the user enters criteria in multiple criteria of the filter fields, the most efficient use case will be to scroll the bottom of the page in order to Clear All criteria. The other option would be to click on the x that appears each individual criteria field to remove the filter criteria. This allows for additional and unnecessary steps to access data particularly combined with the First method listed in this section.
There is a neat feature that allows users to change the filter fields, but again, it isn’t quite ready for prime time. Changing the Filters is a good idea particularly when one does not want to use a particular field, such as the Inactive Date field, but its usefulness is limited to the same filter session of your initial inquiry. The original (default) search layout will reappear after clicking on the opportunity to view its details forcing the user to readjust the filter options in subsequent filters. Changing the filter options and then saving your filter through the Save Search function doesn’t save the filter preferences as well. Thus, to me, makes the Change Filter utterly useless.
I also ran into an issue when you resize the window when wanting to multi-task. When the text size has been increased from the default size, when one resizes the browser window, to half the screen, the viewable information will be cut off. For example, making the window half the screen will cause the website footer to cover the opportunity information. This makes it very difficult to read and to utilize a second window when the text size has been increased. Please note that this activity doesn’t occur if you leave the text at the default size and may depend on the browser settings.
Out of the three main browsers (Microsoft Edge, Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox) it seems to be best to use the Contract Opportunities website with either Microsoft Edge or Google Chrome. When downloading documents, these browsers correctly recognize the file extension. This means, the browser will download the document and recognize the program, for example, file ending with .docx will be saved or opened with Microsoft Word. Mozilla Firefox will not recognize the file but the source to where the file was posted. For example, the location https://iae-fbo-attachments.s3.amazonaws.com appears in the dialog box after clicking on the download link. The file extension isn’t recognized. I only am including this since it is what I experienced with the Firefox browser and knowing that it could be a local setting or that I don’t have a Firefox extension that allows the browser to recognize the correct file through this download function. Your experience may be different if you are using Firefox.
The Contract Opportunities website has not remained static since its launch. I have noticed an early gripe of mine has been changed. At first, when unchecking the box next to Active Only, the search criteria would disappear when I removed the said checkmark. This was irritating since I had to re-enter the search criteria in the fields to duplicate the prior search while hoping I did not forget the exact criteria. At some point, after the launch of the website to the time of this writing, this behavior has been changed/corrected. Now the search criteria that I have entered remains after removing the check mark in subsequent search. The behavior is also the same when you add the check mark into the Active Only field as well. Another function that I noticed that has changed/fixed is the disappearing Title Field after adding it through the Change Filter Function. At the start, this field would disappear after either clicking on an opportunity title or conducting a different filter/search. As of this writing, I was able to view the Title filter field after moving to read a opportunity or do a second search, however, the Inactive Date filter fields remain an issue as the filter fields do not remain removed through the Change Filter function as previously described in this post.
Of my usage for the past month, the clear best possible search method is to enter a Solicitation number (70RFP419RE7000002) within the Keyword field. This will bring the desired results but the downside is that the user must first know the solicitation number to perform this type of search. The prior filter processes listed in the article are attempts to discover the solicitation number and at this point in time it is difficult to get to this information due to the current search/filter function. With access to data being the most important part of any data driven website, in my opinion, the shortcomings listed in the article should have been included. I do say this not knowing what the road map is for the Contract Opportunities search/filter function or if any of these functions will appear shortly or in the near future if at all.
The positives that I have experienced with the move to Contract Opportunities is that the website feels quicker than FBO.gov. I also like the general idea of going to one point of access website for Federal Government information. I just fear that there are too many concessions to get to this one access point that it makes the actual data identification process needlessly harder. It has taken some time to adjust to the new visual layout when compared to the fbo.gov website but I have come to prefer the clean look of the Contract Opportunities website.
This posting concentrates on the aspects of the Contract Opportunities website within the first month of use that I have not liked. I focused on this aspect since each use case and user preferences are different within the Federal Government Business Development community. I wanted to bring some of my insights in order to assist other users with their use of the new website. I do hope that there will be changes soon to address the listed issues that I have described. This website shows a lot of promise in being superior to the prior fbo.gov website but falls short in the execution to this point. This posting revolves my experiences and may not mean that the reader experiences the same issues. There is a provide feedback button to report any issue that you may experience.
