U.S. Patent Office Changes Patent Search Interface
Those of you who feature links to patents on the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office (USPTO) web site on your own sites or in your Favorites, beware. On Tuesday, May 2nd, around 4:30pm EDT, the USPTO switched their patent search system over to a new set of servers which changed a number of things.
This change, as best I can tell, was not announced (if anyone finds an announcement, please let me know).
The biggest change in the new patent search database form are that all patent numbers now must be seven characters in length, padding the left end of patent numbers with zeros. So, the design patent D123,456 now needs to be specified as D0123456, for example.
This change to new servers at the USPTO also resulted in links to search results no longer working as the URLs for search results have changed subtly too. So, any Favorites you might have stored in your web browser to link to a particular patent are now broken too.
I noticed the change a couple of hours after it happened because of both high error reports and a user complaint the that Patent Fetcher service I developed a few years ago had stopped functioning properly for fetching patent publications from the USPTO servers not already on the Patent Fetcher file server. It took several frantic hours of coding, but Patent Fetcher now works just as it did before (and leading zeroes are not required).
I should note that U.S. patent applications were unaffected by this change, as they are located on other servers at the USPTO.
