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Google Patents |
Google Patents is a search engine from Google that indexes patents from the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), which are taken from the original USPTO database (which is in the public domain). All 7 million patents have been put in the database. Optical character recognition (OCR) has been performed on the pages to make them searchable. This searchability includes all US patents.
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The service was launched on December 14, 2006. Google says it uses "the same technology as that underlying Google Books",1 allowing scrolling through pages, and zooming in on areas.2 The images are saveable as PNG files but can be converted with a graphics program to TIFF files which can be OCRed.
The indexing is not perfect. Reportedly, as of 14 December, not all IBM patents were locatable, as searching for IBM patents retrieved only 1,197 results on Google Patents, but that IBM received nearly 3,000 patents in 2005 alone.3
Unlike Google Patents, Espacenet includes US patent applications as well as granted patents. 4 In terms of response time however, the performance of Google Patents is considered to be very good. 4
An example patent may illustrate what the service can offer and what things a researcher may need to watch out for. A Brown truss is a type of bridge truss, used in covered bridges. Its inventor, Josiah Brown Jr., of Buffalo, New York, patented it July 7, 1857. 5 Google Patents has this patent, but the title is "TBUSS-BEIDGE JO SI AH BROWN" 6 presumably due to OCR errors. Contrast with the original from the US patent 17,7227 which has the correct title. Searching for the inventor, or searching with the terms "Truss" or "Bridge" would fail at present. Google has indicated they are taking steps to correct this. For this reason, and because Google search technology does not necessarily return all patents, only the "most relevant", critics have said that this service is valuable, but not yet sufficient to rely on as a sole source,8 and professionals should continue to rely on multiple sources.
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