Original publication date: September, 2008
When creating a search profile in WebCATS, you have the option of restricting the profile’s scope to particular data sources, Federal Supply Groups (FSGs), and/or states. If no restrictions are set (which is the default starting point), then every single bid opportunity in Softshare’s bid match atabase is searched for that profile’s search terms.
On the profile setup page that displays when you click the New Profile button in WebCATS, it’s fairly obvious that, if you don’t want to restrict the profile by data source or FSG, you simply leave the “All” selections in place. But the state selection window is not quite as intuitive. I find that many counselors don’t realize that this is a restriction window and, instead, think that they have to choose every state in the list when they want to search all states.
Besides being tedious, there’s a drawback to choosing every state when the intended goal is not to restrict by state. This is because not every bid notice references a state. But by “restricting” to all states, you’re requiring a state to be present in the text of the bid opportunity, causing the client to possibly miss out on relevant matches. So, if you want all states to be included in your search, your best practice is to bypass the state restriction window altogether. In other words, leave all states deselected.
If you want to search all states except Alaska and Hawaii, leave a comment to that effect in the Comments field and, again, ignore the state restriction window. I’ll write an exclude statement for those two states (rather than a restrict statement for the other 48 states) so that all bid matches will come through except those that specifically reference Alaska or Hawaii.
Don’t confuse state restrictions with the FTO database. If you don’t want bids from outside the country, restricting to states within the country won’t do the trick. What you need do in this case is select all data sources except FTO.