Google Offers Patent Search to Inventors

By NewsFactor Network | December 15, 2006

Google has launched a beta version of a service designed to help inventors search existing patents. The site is currently indexing the seven million patents granted by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), and will add other patent sources in the coming months.

The new service lets users search for patents in several ways, including by patent number, by the name of the inventor, or through keywords. The search technology is similar to Google’s method for displaying published information in its Book Search service.

However, unlike the book-search service, which is unique to Google (and the other search engines bent on making vast collections of books searchable), the USPTO does offer online patent-search capabilities through its own Web site.

Beta Building

In building more features into the beta as it grows toward a final version, Google plans to create a more robust index of patents, which could include images and more scans.

The site — at google.com/patents — already sports many scanned pages, and features a selection of five sample patents on the home page. The patent examples change whenever the page is refreshed, and are usually fanciful creations like a “candy cane forming machine” or a “beer faucet.”

Search results are similar to other Google results pages, but include a patent title, number, and filing date listed prominently.

Limited Appeal

The new Google tool could make it much easier for inventors to search for patents related to their work, but intellectual property attorney Mark McCreary warned that people should not rely solely on the Google patent search for their research.

“The biggest problem here is that an inventor may type in a common phrase for what their invention is, but patents aren’t written in common parlance,” said McCreary, a partner in Philadelphia law firm Fox Rothschild. “It’s difficult to know what something is really called in…

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