While I might not have been too happy with the update from Google yesterday, the update from Google a few hours ago certainly seems like good news. Google already allows users to search through the entire corpus of US patents and starting this week, they have also added the applications that have been submitted to the European Patent Office.
Not only that, they have also added a specific ‘prior art finder‘ that looks remarkably useful. Once a search result is pulled up, a ‘Prior Art Finder’ appears on the top right corner, which allows users to search through ‘multiple resources for related content that existed at the time the patent was filed.’ The search engine does this by picking out key phrases and terms from the application and then combines them in various combinations to form different search terms and then combs through it’s massive index including Google Patents, Google Scholar, Google Books as well as the rest of the internet.
This turns Google Patents into what looks like a very useful tool. However Google still is a private entity and as such, I hope that regardless of how great and convenient (not to mention free) tool this is, patent offices do not start relying on Google Patents more than as a supplemental tool.
It is a welcome step from Google. It may be used as a supplemental tool. But then something is better than nothing. Let us take it as elimination report than the proper search. In trade marks we conduct search of the prior registered and pending trade marks. I do not call it a search (as the database is not fully reliable), but I call it a elimination report. You know at least that the marks that you have been able to find out from search exist.
Is it safe to search to for prior art on google?? As your key words may be a good enough for a person skilled in the art to upcome with the invention. As I know google has all rights to store and sale your keywords to third. Isn’t it a trap to capture the innovation activity by Google.
Although I am a fan of Google, but this feature doesn’t impress me for the fact that the results I found were mostly irrelevant. It appears to, by default, find the prior art up to filing date, not the priority date, even if the latter is available~! I had to manually change the date.
I agree with Anon. here. Even I found the resulted to be mostly irrelevant.