Onvia debuts search tool to enable vendors to find government contracting opportunities

Onvia, a provider of “Intelligence for Winning More Government Business,” announced on Oct. 13 the release of Onvia 7, a major upgrade to Onvia’s core platform and is immediately available to Onvia’s customer base of over 3,000 clients doing business in the public sector.

For over a decade, Onvia has been helping clients win more business in the government market by providing government bid notifications, agency contact lists, advance notices and public sector business intelligence.

Onvia 7 offers a next generation search experience to Onvia’s clients to help them discover more relevant business opportunities in the public sector.

“With Onvia 7, we’ve leveraged our decade of experience in this space and millions of procurement documents to build a unique terminology of the phrases agencies use to buy products and services,” said Jagan Nemani, VP of product at Onvia. “This terminology is seamlessly integrated into our search experience going forward, so our customers can spend less time searching for relevant opportunities and more time responding to them.”

Most government procurement search engines operate on literal search terms. Users enter in keywords and only get results that exactly match the search terms they entered. This can be a major problem for vendors looking to sell into the public sector because there are tens of thousands of agencies across the country making hundreds of thousands of purchases per year and the agencies do not use a standard language to describe the products and services they are looking to purchase. The lack of standardized terminology in procurement documents can cause vendors to miss bidding opportunities because they do not always know which terms and variations to search for.

Onvia utilized industry experts and the latest search technology to analyze millions of government procurement documents to build a comprehensive database of phrases that cover the terminology government agencies use to purchase products and services. Onvia 7 helps clients create smarter searches by identifying the right keywords for their search and Onvia 7 dramatically improves search results by automatically including synonyms, variations and agency misspellings. With Onvia 7, customers never miss an opportunity due to a slight variation in the language a specific agency is using to describe a product or service.

Hank Riner, President and CEO of Onvia, commented on the release, stating, “Onvia has the broadest and deepest coverage of state and local government procurement intelligence on the market today. With Onvia 7, our customers will be able to mine this massive amount of intelligence to quickly and effectively find the relevant public sector opportunities that fit their business. Onvia 7 is going to be a major competitive advantage for our customers striving to win more government business.”