Methodology

Notice listings are read from SAM.gov’s public Get Opportunities API and stored exactly as SAM.gov served them. The description of most notices comes from SAM.gov’s public daily data file. Both are read in batches rather than live, so a notice appears here only after BidLookup next reads SAM.gov, not when SAM.gov publishes it. How soon that is depends on when BidLookup last read SAM.gov; no update frequency is promised.

BidLookup finds notices by reading SAM.gov’s listings by the date each notice was posted, looking back up to two years. A notice is here only once one of those reads has returned it, so the index can be missing notices that are open on SAM.gov, including any posted more than two years ago. A notice SAM.gov has changed or withdrawn since BidLookup last read it may be out of date here.

Each notice’s page says when BidLookup first recorded it and when it last confirmed it; what those dates mean.

Four kinds of notice, the ones a business can respond to:

• solicitations
• combined synopses/solicitations
• presolicitations
• sources sought

Award notices, justifications and special notices are not included. Notices whose deadline has passed, or which SAM.gov has archived, are kept but are not listed in search by default.

Most descriptions come from SAM.gov’s daily data file and are shown as plain text, exactly as the file has them. That file cuts a description at 32,000 bytes; a description cut there says so and links to the whole notice on SAM.gov.

Where the file’s description is cut, blank or missing, BidLookup can ask SAM.gov’s API for the full description instead, a few notices at a time within a small daily allowance, so a notice can wait for its description or never receive it. Opening a notice never asks SAM.gov for anything. A notice whose description has not been retrieved yet still shows every other detail, with a link to read it on SAM.gov.

Each notice shows one description, and that same description is what search looks in.

A deadline is shown on the clock SAM.gov stated it in, with that time zone’s offset from UTC, rather than converted to one zone for everyone. When SAM.gov gives only a date, or a time BidLookup cannot place in a time zone, the page shows the date alone and says the exact time is unavailable; it does not invent a time.

A notice with an exact deadline leaves the default search results at that moment. A notice with only a date, or a time with no time zone, stays listed until that date ends in UTC. That cutoff is BidLookup’s own interim rule, not a closing time the agency stated, so when the hour matters, check the notice on SAM.gov.

Besides the dates SAM.gov gives, such as the posted date and the deadline, a notice page shows dates from BidLookup’s own records. These are calendar dates in UTC.

First recorded

The date of the first read of SAM.gov’s listings that BidLookup stored the notice from.

Last confirmed

The latest date BidLookup has recorded for reading the notice in SAM.gov’s listings. It does not mean the notice is unchanged or still open on SAM.gov today. Reading the daily data file or fetching a notice’s description does not change it.

As published on

For a description from SAM.gov’s daily data file, the date of the latest file BidLookup has read that carried that description.

SAM.gov publishes no “last modified” time. BidLookup can tell that a notice changed only when it reads the notice again and finds content different from the version it last stored. It then keeps the new version beside the old one rather than overwriting it. If a notice changes more than once between two reads, only the last of those versions is seen.

Several notices can share one solicitation number: often a presolicitation and the solicitation that follows it, sometimes a revision SAM.gov published under a new notice ID. SAM.gov does not say which notice another one replaces, so BidLookup lists each as a separate notice and does not mark any as an amendment of another.

SAM.gov’s API offers only the latest version of a notice, so BidLookup has an earlier version only if it read that version before it was replaced. An earlier version stored under its own notice ID has its own page here; earlier content of a notice whose ID stayed the same is kept but not shown.

• Attachments are not copied. BidLookup links to them on SAM.gov and never mirrors the files.
• Notices are not corrected. Dates, contacts and descriptions appear as the agency published them, including the occasional deadline dated before the notice was posted.
• Nothing here requires an account, and search is free.