Google announces search for US patents

Google, which has earned a distinction for itself as the world’s largest search engine, has added more to its search portfolio on Friday after announcing a beta version of a new tool that searches patent filings.

About their latest service, dubbed Google Patent Search, Doug Banks, Google software engineer, in his blog said, “Today, we're excited to be releasing the beta version of Google Patent Search, which makes it easy to search the full text of the U.S. patent corpus and find patents that interest you.”

Google has been working constantly to expand the diversity of useful content it makes available for worldwide users to get accessed to.

Google Patent Search initially covers seven million patents made available by the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), from patents issued in the 1790s through those issued in the middle of 2006. However, Google has plans to add some more sources in near future.

It plans to build an index of patent documents, including images, by scanning the documents and using optical character recognition technology.

Users can search the full text of U.S. patents from the Google Patent Search homepage, or by visiting the Advanced Patent Search page to search by criteria like patent number, the name of the person filing the patent, by keywords or filing date.

Once the user start searching, the information about the inventor displays on the screen and the details of patent can be viewed online page-by-page.

Google Patent Search, which is currently available in English, and includes only US patents, uses the same technology that powers the Mountain View, California-based company's Google Book Search service, which enables users to scroll pages and zoom in on text and illustrations.

However, the copyright holders had ardently opposed the Google Book Search service.

The USPTO currently offers online access to the images of the entire database of U.S. patents through its website.

"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, who formerly developed products for Nokia and is now a freelance inventor.

Commenting on the other face of the recently launched Google service, Overy, who is also a secretary for the Wessex Round Table of Inventors, an inventors club in England said the new offering from Google may, though, ease the searchers’ headache, but it may still not be able to fully solve the problem.

"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.