Google searches U.S. patent database

IDG News Service - If you've ever dreamed up an ingenious new invention and then wondered if someone else has already made it, Google Inc.'s new patent search offering is for you.

The new site, www.google.com/patents, lets anyone search for U.S. patents by keyword, patent number, inventor and filing date. Users can view a scanned image of the original patent and zoom in on pages.

The main search page displays five random patents each time the page is visited. Recent inventions that have popped up include a toy skunk, a pocket protector, a toupee and a doll that has delayed wetting and crying action.

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office already allows anyone to search its site for patent documents. But Google's offering may have some advantages.

 "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, secretary for the Wessex Round Table of Inventors, an inventors club in England. Overy formerly developed products for Nokia Corp. and is now a freelance inventor.

Google said that like its Web search technology, the patent search site uses a number of different signals to evaluate how relevant each patent is to a user's query and then determines results with an algorithm.

The European Patent Office also hosts such a service, covering patents from European countries, the U.S., Canada and other patent authorities. Overy said that database is good but not user-friendly.

Discovering existing patents is critical for inventors, whose ability to make money on an invention could be severely reduced by an existing patent, Overy said.

Although Google's offering may ease what is often a tedious job, it may not be able to fully solve the problem of finding information, he said. One issue is the naming of new inventions. "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.

Google's patent search covers 7 million patents. The database doesn't include patents issued in the past few months, but Google "looks forward to expanding our coverage in the future," according to the FAQ section of its site. 

Google's database lists U.S. patents only, but  the company said it hopes to expand the patent offices it includes and the languages it supports. 

The site also may one day allow users to save and print patents. A note at the bottom of a posting about the new service on the Google blog says that a reference to saving and printing has been removed because Google is still working on those capabilities.