[Ip-health] Google searches U.S. patent database

[Malini Aisola]

Google searches U.S. patent database

December 14, 2006
Nancy Gohring

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9006083&intsrc=news_ts_head


Google offering seen as more user-friendly

If you've ever dreamed up an ingenious new invention and then wondered
if someone else has already made it, Google Inc.'s new patent search
offering is for you.

The new site, www.google.com/patents, lets anyone search for U.S.
patents by keyword, patent number, inventor and filing date. Users can
view a scanned image of the original patent and zoom in on pages.

The main search page displays five random patents each time the page is
visited. Recent inventions that have popped up include a toy skunk, a
pocket protector, a toupee and a doll that has delayed wetting and
crying action.

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office already allows anyone to search its
site for patent documents. But Google's offering may have some advantages.

 "The existing Web sites have patents that you can view, so it's not
that the information isn't there. The problem is finding it, and that's
where Google's expertise comes in," said Mike Overy, secretary for the
Wessex Round Table of Inventors, an inventors club in England. Overy
formerly developed products for Nokia Corp. and is now a freelance inventor.

Google said that like its Web search technology, the patent search site
uses a number of different signals to evaluate how relevant each patent
is to a user's query and then determines results with an algorithm.

The European Patent Office also hosts such a service, covering patents
from European countries, the U.S., Canada and other patent authorities.
Overy said that database is good but not user-friendly.

Discovering existing patents is critical for inventors, whose ability to
make money on an invention could be severely reduced by an existing
patent, Overy said.

Although Google's offering may ease what is often a tedious job, it may
not be able to fully solve the problem of finding information, he said.
One issue is the naming of new inventions. "If you've invented what you
think is the first gizmo whatsit, and you type that into a search
engine, you won't find much because the other person who invented it
called it something different," he said.

Google's patent search covers 7 million patents. The database doesn't
include patents issued in the past few months, but Google "looks forward
to expanding our coverage in the future," according to the FAQ section
of its site.

Google's database lists U.S. patents only, but  the company said it
hopes to expand the patent offices it includes and the languages it
supports.

The site also may one day allow users to save and print patents. A note
at the bottom of a posting about the new service on the Google blog says
that a reference to saving and printing has been removed because Google
is still working on those capabilities.