Every euro spent by a State Public Administration must be traceable by citizens. We don’t say it, the law says it. But theory is one thing and practice another: if you try, you will discover that sometimes it is a long, tedious and sometimes almost impossible mission.
Let me explain: when someone wants to know which company a public hospital or city council has awarded contracts to, the official search path forces them to go through different platforms ranging from Public Sector Procurement Platform state to autonomous regions such as those of the Community of Madrid, the Basque Country or Galicia, because there are CCAA (quite a few) that have their own system and do not publish in PLACSP. This fragmentation makes the search difficult, as details the Public Procurement Observatory. So an engineer has set out to solve it by building a search engine for Spanish public contracts.
The “Google” of public contracts in Spain. jobsearch.com solves this fragmentation problem with a single search engine. It is an independent project that aggregates, cross-references and allows you to consult in seconds the public procurement information that the State publishes dispersedly on a long list of different platforms.
More specifically, it draws from 10 official sources, including the State Platform (PLACSP), the Official Journal of the EU (TED), and regional platforms of Madrid, Catalonia, Galicia, Andalusia, the Basque Country, Asturias and the Valencian Community, plus data from the Commercial Registry. The result is a search engine with around 13.4 million indexed contracts, without advertising, without tracking and with open source available on GitHub. Behind the project, Gerard Sanchezprogrammer and founder of BQuant and professor at the University of Navarra and the UPF Barcelona School of Management.
Why is it important. Public procurement is not trivial: in Spain it moved more than 113 billion euros in 2024, the equivalent of 10.92% of GDP, according to the OIReScon Annual Surveillance Report 2025the official supervisory body of the Ministry of Finance. Each year a sum of money is allocated through procedures that must be public and auditable.
The reality is that this audit is very difficult without tools. A CNMC report of 2019 highlights that public procurement represents between 10% and 20% of Spanish GDP and that Spain is one of the European countries with the lowest participation of companies in tenders: only one company participates in one in three state contracts. With data access tools that facilitate transparency, competition could be increased and the cost for public coffers reduced.
Context. In Spain there are several laws that require public contracts to be published: there is the Law 19/2013 on transparency, access to public information and good governance with a triple objective of increasing transparency in public activity, guaranteeing access to information as a right and establishing good governance obligations for public officials, but also the Law 9/2017 on Public Sector Contractswhich is a transposition of European directives on public procurement.
So the problem is not that there are no regulations, but rather their application and the dispersion of data. As explains the Public Procurement ObservatorySince March 2018, it has been mandatory for the entire public sector to publish the information on their contracts in the PLACSP, but the tool is also a headache as thousands of entities upload information manually and with free-writing text, which constitutes a continuous source of error. PreciselyBuscalicitaciones.com detects and documents these inconsistencies.
How it works. Technically, the project downloads and normalizes the open data that each of those 10 official platforms publishes in structured formats such as XML, JSON, CSV. Each record is crossed with data from the Commercial Registry to enrich the information of the successful bidder. The search engine offers three main modes of use: search for contracts by winning company, contracting body, CPV sector or free text of the contract; see the complete history of awards of any company by its NIF and consult a public registry of contracts with anomalous amounts greater than 1,000 million euros.
Yes, but. The first major limitation is structural: it depends on the quality of the data published by official sources and that quality can clearly be improved. If the source data is bad, the aggregator inherits that error. And we have already seen that sometimes it is and that it is certainly anything but homogeneous.
On the other hand, this is the first version of the project and it shows: It has flaws and the coverage is not complete. Navarra does not appear on the list and sources such as the Valencian Community do not have an aggregate amount available, the Basque Country only has an amount in 106,000 of its 651,000 contracts and Catalonia has two separate entries with different coverage. On the other hand, the independent and altruistic nature of this public utility resource also has its B side: long-term sustainability, given its great magnitude.
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