When documents are returned after a search has completed, the order in which the documents appear on the screen is based on what is known as relevance ranking. Each document is scored based on its relevance to a user's question, where the most relevant document has the highest score, or rank -- 1000 being the highest, 1 being the lowest. Documents are returned to the screen in order of the document with the highest score listed first and the document receiving the lowest score appearing last.
A document receives a higher score if the words in the question are in the headline, if the words appear many times, or if phrases occur as they do in the question. A document's score is derived using techniques such as word weighting, term weighting, proximity relationships, and word density.
Each bill number in the list is underlined. Clicking on the underlined bill number will return a list of all the associated documents. These documents will include the bill status, history, text (all versions), and if applicable, analyses, votes and veto message.
To retrieve bill documents, click on the underlined bill number.