Congressional data may soon be easier to use online Online, searching for a bill in Congress feels a little like time travel: Go looking for legislation, and you wind up in the Internet of 1995. At Congress's "90s-vintage archive site, there's no way to compare bills side by side. No tool to measure the success rate of a bill's sponsor. And there's certainly no way to leave a comment. Congress makes it hard for outside sites to do any of this, either, by refusing to give out bulk data on its bills in a user-friendly form. On Friday, that might start to change. Prodded by an unlikely lobbyist - a 30-year-old in Columbia Heights who has jury-rigged his own database of congressional stats - the GOP-led House could take a step toward releasing a trove of data about itself. This could be the raw material for an Angie's List or a Yelp for Congress, a way for modern users to evaluate lawmakers with the same kind of crowdsourced help that they use to evaluate lunch. Which means it could be something that Congress eventually will regret. The world [of Congress] is more futile than you thought. It's actually sadder than you thought," said Josh Tauberer, the guy in Columbia Heights. The new data will make his job easier, but it could also make him less relevant, since some users will be able to go directly to Congress to find the information he provides on his site, govtrack.us. As early as Friday, the House is expected to vote on a measure intended to jump-start the process of releasing bulk data in the user-friendly XML format. It has the backing of Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio), Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) and other GOP leaders. If that XML data is eventually released, a broader set of users could make their own applications to carve up congressional data. Some might rate congressmen like restaurants. Others might follow the Angie's List model and treat congressmen like contractors: Which representative gets the most bills passed? Who talks a lot, but gets the least done? Or an app might treat them like potential blind dates. Just type in how you would have voted on a set of bills, and it could search the real votes to find your best match in Congress. The libertarian Cato Institute is already working to digitally "tag" spending amounts in legislation so that a user can search for every bill that would spend more than $10 million. The release in XML would make all of it easier. "What could you do if you had an overview of every committee appearance by a particular witness over the last five years?" said Thomas Bruce, a professor at Cornell Law School. He thought more: What if those witnesses could be checked for their political leanings or their campaign contributions? What would that say about the reliability of the advice Congress is getting? Bruce said the House was smart to realize that it couldn't hold on to this information forever, since Tauberer and others were inventing ways to compile it themselves. "This really is a teen-sex problem," he said. Your kid is either going to find out from you or from the other kids.