Google just released new Google Patent Search, a new service which will make it easy to search in the US patents database. It looks that google have scanned all the US patents and make it available searchable in full text ! You can find the new service at www.google.com/patents or use the Advanced Patent form to search by criteria, including patent number, inventor, and filing date.
The service will be very interesting not only for professional but also for education and students to learn who invented what and explore the different available patents. Maybe it’s the most important reason behind developing such product, which is the Google focus on universities and research. Google started the database with 7 million patents granted by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), which is really huge !
The patent page are similar and include in the first page which is the summary the abstract with different basic information such number, filling date … etc, then you can find the claims, the citations of other patents and the patents that have reference to it. There is also a search box inside the page to allow you search inside the patent itself.
The new patent search is not very different from the Google Book search in the technology used, since the two projects are based on scanning available documents then make them as a searchable database. You can view the drawing of a patent with the possibility to zoom in out and navigate through the available pages …
It’s just new, simple and easy to use as Google product are used to be, but I can’t confirm the page rank that google is assigning to patents to display in results, also I find it very hard to read titles in upper case. If they could include other database in the future I think it will be really revolutionary, not the service itself but the searchable database.
