Innovation is a crucial requirement for the development and deployment of new technologies. For the creation of new technologies, there is a widely used model called the “technology life cycle”. The life cycle of technologies can be divided into 4 stages:
- Invention;
- Research, Development, and Dissemination (RD&D);
- Market development; and
- Commercial diffusion.
Patents can play a prominent role in the entire technology life cycle, allowing competitive technologies to be protected and licensed to third parties to expand commercial opportunities. Therefore, knowing how to use available patent databases, often free of charge, is a key to intelligently advancing research and technologies.
How to do a Patent Search?
There are many patent databases to do a patent search, and choosing the best one is no easy task. To perform a prior art search, focusing on technological inspiration, you would want to choose a patent database that covers the patent documents from most patent offices. Exhaustiveness is going to be key for you here.
What are the best patent search engines?
Free patent search sites are ideal for getting content quickly. Listed below are some free patent databases that can help you in your pursuit of patent data search and analysis.
- Google Patents
- Espacenet
- Patentscope (WIPO)
GOOGLE PATENTS
How do I do a patent search on Google?
Google Patents includes over 120 million patent publications from 100+ patent offices around the world, as well as many more technical documents and books indexed in Google Scholar and Google Books, and documents from the Prior Art Archive. It offers a good user interface and makes reading a patent a two-click job. It also offers the option to save the patents in PDF.
Google Patents allows you to search patents on the basis of the following variables:
- Search terms
- Date
- Assignee
- Inventor
This can be further classified with the following filters
- Patent Office
- Status (granted/applied)
- Type (patent/design)
Google offers an easy-to-understand guidebook to perform the best searches according to the user’s needs. And if you come across a patent in a different language, Google patents can translate the patent’s language to the language of your choice.
ESPACENET
How do you search on Espacenet?
Espacenet holds data on more than 65 million patents from 90 countries. Some countries offer full text, others just citation and abstract.
You can search for patents on Espacenet by opting for one of the options below:
- Smart search: you can enter up to 20 search terms (a maximum of ten terms per searchable bibliographic data), with or without field identifiers.
- Advanced search: you can perform an in-depth search with the following variables:
- Title
- Abstract
- Publication number
- Application number
- Priority number
- Publication date
- Applicants
- Inventor(s)
- CPC
- IPC
- Classification Search: you can search for patents on the basis of CPC (Cooperative Patent Classification)
The website offers a video tutorial on almost every page, for best use. Espacenet also gives the option to star a patent in the “My Patent List” tab, or to download the original patent in PDF.
PATENTSCOPE BY WIPO
Patentscope holds 100 million patent documents including 4.2 million published international patent applications (PCT). Through this website, you can search patents, trademarks, industrial designs, geographic indications, and the brand-new database that you can search for plant varieties (PLUTO Plant Variety Database).
How do you search on Patentscope?
The default screen presented to you will be Simple Search. The simple search option is pretty easy to use, and the results are self-explanatory. You can use the name field to search for an inventor, assignee, applicant, etc. in the Advanced Patent Search, you can use proximity operators and also the stem feature. Stemming considers your keyword as root and searches for other terms originating from it.
Patenscope offers video tutorials for every type of search provided.
Now that we are sorted about the free patent databases, start searching and get inspired. When it comes to do a prior art search before filing a patent application, we highly recommend you to speak to a patent attorney.
Ready to get startedwith a patent search? Contact us.