Nina Quattrocchi – FindTheBest – A Research Engine: “The government awards trillions of taxpayer dollars every year in contracts, grants, and loans, and it’s nearly impossible to keep track of where that money is going. Thousands of new businesses are created in the US each year, and it’s hard for those young companies to know where to start if they’re interested in applying for government contracts, grants, and loans. Even the experts who spend their time constantly analyzing government spending reports have a hard time tracking the complete cycle of government spending. For the past year, we’ve been focused on improving the research process one goes through when interested in learning about government spending. First, we launched Government Contracts, a database of the 9 million federal government contracts awarded since 2000. Next, we focused on building a Government Contractors topic that created profiles for the more than 600,000 companies that have provided products or services to the government since 2000. Today, we’re announcing our next major topic that will help people truly understand the full cycle of government spending with the launch of our Agency Spending topic, which includes profiles for the more than 300 government departments and agencies that have awarded contracts, grants, or loans since 2000. On each profile in the Agency Spending topic, users can see the breakdown of contracts, grants, and loans awarded by each department or agency. Users can research a department or agency’s top award recipients, information about the products and services they procure, where their awards are being performed, recent awards, and more.”