The Open Source Research (TOSR Co.)

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.