More than 7 million patents filed are now searchable on a new Google site (www.google.com/patents) launched Thursday.
Historians, inventors and lawyers have had access to free patent searches through the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) for years, but Google's (nasdaq: GOOG - news - people ) site, which searches patents filed through mid-2006, makes the patents--such as this ( http://www.google.com/patents?id=8GM_AAAAEBAJ) or this ( http://www.google.com/patents?id=MuxQAAAAEBAJ)--even more accessible, with text searches, documented updates and fast loading.
“It's a natural extension of our mission to make this public-domain government information more easily accessible using Google’s search technology,” writes Google Software Engineer Doug Banks on the company’s blog.
As for Google’s own patents, its latest is too recent for its new search site, though it was filed in March 2004. Granted on Dec. 12, 2006, Patent DF33561 covers the visual design of Google’s search results pages--you know, those headings, extracts and very long string of “o”s in Google’s name that represent the number of results pages.
Google will update its patent search site as fast as it can get access to new patent data, wrote Google engineer Danny Berlin on Patently O, a law blog read mostly by students, professors and lawyers.
Some of Patently O’s readers feel that Google’s patent search isn’t as useful as other subscription services, such as Delphion and MicroPatent.
One reader pointed out that a search for IBM (nyse: IBM - news - people ) patents retrieved only 1,197 results on Google Patents, but that IBM received nearly 3,000 patents in 2005 alone. “I’ll bug someone about the IBM stuff,” wrote Berlin.
For professionals--such as inventors seeking to determine if an idea is patentable, or lawyers looking to prosecute or litigate a patent--Google’s new product, at least in its current iteration, is unlikely to impress. The PTO offers downloading patents in PDF form via www.pat2pdf.org, and Google Patents doesn’t yet.
But for casual searchers interested in, say, the history of the toupee ( http://www.google.com/patents?id=0mlWAAAAEBAJ), Google’s site should work just fine.
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