Michael Dolan Dot Com

Friday, December 15th, 2006

How is Google Patents search different from the USPTO search?

If you’ve ever used the USPTO’s website to perform a patent search you have probably found it’s a real pain. Most lawyers don’t use it either - they pay other services providers to do the patent search for them. That’s why I was so excited when I heard Google was launching a Patent Search (Google Patents: http://www.google.com/patents) product and visions of simplified searches filled my head. It’s free of course, doesn’t yet appear to be sponsored by ads, and it’s fast. Plus, you are not limited to searching by fields - you can run a wide open query across all fields (nice) and if you want to go granular with various in field searches, that option is there too.

The cool thing about this is it makes patent searches much easier for non-lawyers and in my view is very good for developers or project leads in the community. It’s still a Google ‘beta’ but I think this one has some long term potential.