UK FrictionLab
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Methodology — Open Opportunities Finder

The problem

UK small and medium businesses lose time discovering relevant public-sector contract opportunities and support schemes. The two authoritative portals — Contracts Finder and Find a Tender — are the correct destinations, but their machine-readable feeds require OAuth credentials and are not openly scrapeable. This Bridge helps a business orient by surfacing open government datasets relevant to their sector, then sends them to the official portals.

What this tool does

Data source & honesty

Results are fetched live from https://www.data.gov.uk/api/3/action/package_search at request time. If that source is unavailable, the tool shows an honest "source unavailable" message and the official portal links — it never fabricates results. Economic impact is unquantified until measured usage data exists.

Calculation

Sector classification: for each dataset, the title + description is lower-cased and tested against fixed keyword lists per sector. A dataset may match multiple sectors. No scoring model, no LLM.

Limitations