The Richter Scale^®

Google yesterday announced a new feature - searching and displaying U.S. patents. And as with everything Google does, this new feature is well implemented and easy to use.

The location for the Google Patent search is http://www.google.com/patents.

You can do full text searches on published U.S. patents (published U.S. patent applications and non-U.S. patents are not supported at this time, but Google has indicated that those may be supported in the future).

When you get a result list back from a search and click on one of the results (which will be a patent), you then have the option to read the patent pages, as well as search further in that particular patent - a very nice feature. If you opt to read the patent pages, they are brought up in special Google-developed viewer, with search terms highlighted on the page - also a very nice feature. However, it’s only as good as the OCR quality, as I discovered.

With my Patent Fetcher hat on, I am a bit relieved that Google is not offering PDF downloads of resulting patents, although frankly that would be a nice feature to have.

While dedicated patent search sites like Delphion are still far superior in some of their search capabilities compared to Google Patent Search, Google’s new search offering is vastly better than what the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office offers for issued patents, and certainly its patent viewing feature is very useful too.

More details to be found at http://www.google.com/googlepatents/about.html.