15 December 2006 | Author: C. Philip

Google launches patent search facility

Google have always strived to enlarge the diversity of content they make available to their users, and the recent launch of Google's patent search facility is only the latest interesting development in Google's constantly expanding range of products. Through Google Patent Search, users can now search the full text of the US patent corpus and find patents that interest them.

Users can view a scanned image of the original patent and zoom in on pages. The main search page displays five different random patents each time the page is visited.





















All patents listed in the Google Patent Search index come from the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). The total number of patents issued by USPTO currently stands at around seven million. Patents issued in the United States are public domain government information, and images of the entire database of US patents are readily available online via the USPTO website. Using the same technology that powers Google Book Search, Google has converted the entire image database of U.S. patents into a format that's easy to search. On the Google Patents search homepage, users can search the full text of U.S. patents and the advanced patent search page allows the user to search for patents using a range of different variables through a very simple and user friendly interface.

Google Patent Search covers the entire collection of patents made available by the USPTO. The earliest issued patents date back to the 1790s and the most recent were issued in mid-2006. At present Google do not include patent applications, international patents, or US patents issued over the last few months, but they promise to expand coverage in the future.

Patent information is available on other websites as well, but Google have been able to use their expertise to introduce a facility which now makes it easy for users to find information on patents. Google's patent search index evaluates the relevance of a product and indexes accordingly, in a similar fashion to the way in which it indexes pages within the main search algorithm. Google uses a combination of many different factors for this evaluation before determining the products ranking.

With the patent search currently covering only US patents, we can perhaps expect the expansion of this facility to cover international patents in the future. The European Patent Office also hosts a similar online patent service , covering patents from European countries, the US, Canada and other patent authorities.

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