Patent pages now feature a “Find prior art” button that instantly pulls together information relevant to the patent application.
The Prior Art Finder identifies key phrases from the text of the patent, combines them into a search query, and displays relevant results from Google Patents, Google Scholar, Google Books, and the rest of the web. You’ll start to see the blue “Find prior art” button on individual patent pages starting today.
Our hope is that this tool will give patent searchers another way to discover information relevant to a patent application, supplementing the search techniques they use today. We’ll be refining and extending the Prior Art Finder as we develop a better understanding of how to analyze patent claims and how to integrate the results into the workflow of patent searchers.
These are small steps toward making this collection of important but complex documents better understood. Sometimes language can be a barrier to understanding, which is why earlier this year we
released an update to Google Translate that incorporates the European Patent Office’s parallel patent texts, allowing the EPO to provide translation between English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and Swedish, with more languages scheduled for the future. And with the help of the United States Patent & Trademark Office, we’ve continued to add to
our repository of USPTO bulk data, making it easier for researchers and law firms to analyze the entire corpus of US patents. More to come!
What an exciting new tool! It will be fun to test drive and to see it improve over time. Thanks!
ReplyDeleteOn the face of it, it appears to be very good tool that'l make the life easier for those whose job is to find a prior art for an application filed in the USPTO. The Interface is very helpful and allows addition of one's own keywords for searching.
ReplyDeleteI did a preliminary check. Original keywords are taken largely from the title and abstract. Thus, the prior art returned is based on these keywords rather than those in the claims. The prior art presented should be targeted to the claims.
ReplyDeleteSupplementing original keywords with your own and selecting appropriate combinations improves the returned results vastly.