Posted by Ian Wetherbee, Tech Lead / Manager, Google Patents
When we started
Google Patents almost 10 years ago, our mission was to make patents more easily accessible. Today, we're announcing the addition of 11 more countries to Google Patents with over 41 million new patent publications, bringing the total to over 87 million publications from 17 patent offices around the world.
Starting today, you can now search for patents and applications from Japan, South Korea, the United Kingdom, Spain, France, Belgium, Russia, the Netherlands, Finland, Denmark, and Luxembourg in Google Patents. If you’re interested in learning more about inventions such as
bulldozing devices,
wind farming, or
how to make rice wine, you can now search for them and many more.
Like our other patent publications, this new collection has been translated into English using
Google Translate so you can search using English keywords or the original language. Our collection also includes scientific papers and books from
Google Scholar and
Google Books, which have been machine-classified like patents with
Cooperative Patent Classification codes for easier discovery. You can learn more in the new
help center.
A robust prior art search, combining advanced search technology and a patent examiner’s technical expertise, allows an examiner to determine if an invention is new and non-obvious. As a result, technology that was already known isn’t taken from the public, and innovative companies won’t be targeted with unnecessary and expensive lawsuits that drain R&D resources. Patent holders trying to protect the next groundbreaking invention benefit too by gaining more certainty that their patents won’t be invalidated later because of prior art that wasn’t found during examination.
We’ll continue to improve Google Patents to make the collection of patents and prior art accessible and useful to patent examiners, inventors, and the public around the world.
