Our readers must be kept informed of a recent development in this
world. Google just launched a new service to enable searches in the U.S. patent
collection. This module will provide you with the essential information
regarding this service and its use in the context of your R&D
projects.
What are the differences between this and other similar
free patent search offerings?
The main difference between this and other products is that
Google
Patents is based on the powerful
Google Book
Search technology and ranks search results. The search is conducted
in the complete text of the U.S. patent collection which consists of more than
7 million documents.
Is it advisable to use this service?
Because of its intuitiveness, this service is a very nice gate to
patent information. Laymen can usually easily obtain relevant documents
relating to a given technology by entering a few keywords or even a
sentence.
Earlier esp@cenet quiz published in this newsletter can also be
treated using this tool. In some cases, we obtain initial results by simply
entering a text string describing the invention:
Straw filtering water
Keys with devices for indicating whether the last operation was
locking or unlocking
For more complicated cases (when there is a low number of relevant
documents covering the invention), this tool will not be of more help than
others. This quiz for instance (A chip under your skin replacing your wallet)
requires a better strategy than simply entering a text or keywords.
To sum up, do not refrain from using this tool to perform some
initial quick, superficial searches that can reveal relevant documents.
The limitations
This tool cannot be considered adequate for
performing the professional search needed in many cases in the course of an
R&D project.
Patent information specialists have detected
many inadequacies like:
- coverage limited to 7 million U.S. documents (this is by far not
all prior art available in patent documents)
- no truncations/wildcards in keywords or classification possible
(a very limiting feature)
- no European classification (ECLA) available
- no proximity operator
- search is done in OCRed image (not the actual full-text): words
with line-break are not found (example: ampli- fication only found when keyword
"ampli" is used)
- OCR-problems, e.g.
US Pat. 2
- OCR-problem
US 814049: Issue date 6 Mar 1000 instead of 6 Mar 1906
- strange titles probably due to OCR-problems e.g. "Other Publications", "Prior Art", "xx x xx", "
D526233"
- Searching for "Google" finds, among others responses,
US2126697 referring to a Goggle set
- limited hit list (max. 1116 hits) of which only the first 600
can be displayed (max. 12 result pages with 50 patents/page)
examples:
apparatus = 1116 hits,
method = 1116 hits,
device = 1116 hits
- search with/without OR-operator leads to different results,
examples:
business OR method = 1116 results,
business method = 1100 results
page numbering of search result not consistent and not always
corresponding to actual page (example: keyword
"oligonucleotide" within US4683195 leads to
non-consistent order of page-hits (2 + page 14), hit on page 37 (is actually
column 37) though no highlighting on this page/column (but keyword
oligonucleotides exists --> fuzzy search ?)
- strange citing back : US4683195 at
USPTO (REF/4683195: 1462 patents) and at
Google (6 patents)
On the other hand, the full-text indexing enables searches
like:
- Quick text string search in U.S. patents: "metal contacts to gallium nitride"
- An easy reference number retrieval, but beware there is
absolutely no guarantee of not missing a document:
5-124,890 provides you with this list of results
containing this Japanese patent number.
This shows that in spite of the current limitations there
is potential to further develop such tools to supplement existing professional
sources to the best benefit of end users. As usual, information literacy is key
in order not to be misled by initial results showing your invention is new or
has not been protected. As the saying goes, "Absence of evidence is no evidence
of absence".
Further reading
Google Patents described in
wikipedia
An article analysing the tool
A thorough professional analysis: In a year-based
comparison of a USPTO search and a Google Patents search the latter yields very
superficial results.
More on the
OCR technology being used by Google
A nice presentation on Google Book Search giving some
hints on the Google vision
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