Advanced Google Search allows you to more precisely craft your policy searches. Often helpful advanced limits include "exact word or phrase," "site or domain," "last update." Language and many other specific limits are also possible from this page.
When searching Google, synonyms for "policy" and the term "policy" itself should be used in combination with keywords that match your topic. Policy synonyms arguably include terms like "bill, law, legislation, proposal, white paper, policy brief, regulation, position paper, guideline, protocol, recommendation, rule, standard, etc."
Google searches a large amount of information on the Internet. It does not search everything but it does crawl through a massive chunk of policy making think tank content, legal sources, news stories, magazine articles, blog & Facebook posts, Tweets, and the like. (Google Search is described in some detail at Wikipedia)
Publishers of policy do not typically bury their ideas behind pay walls, or publish in prohibitively expensive academic journals. Policy truly wants to be free (to mangle a phrase) and for that reason, Google becomes an especially effective policy discovery platform.
Although its search algorithm (the "page rank" engine that drives the search) is effective for policy discovery, it is essential to remember that no single search platform is capable of searching all web content at once, certainly not Google. What you don't see is alot: Kristin Finklea, Congressional Research Service, R44101, DARK WEB (March 10 2017) at https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R44101.pdf.
Think tanks can be a great resource for research and statistics on a variety of topics, but think tanks are advocacy oriented. That a think tank refers to itself as non-partisan means that it has no formal connection to a political party, not that it doesn’t have an ideological orientation that may be more consistent with a given political party.
The following are well-known think tanks:
Newspapers can be helpful sources of current information about new policies. Editorials and the Op-Ed pages are particularly good places to look, because they are spaces in which people write about problems and how they might be solved.
Federal Policies
Use the resources below to find raw statistics and make your own graphs and charts to show trends. You can also look in newspapers and databases to find graphs and charts created by others.