Google Patents

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Google Patents

URL

http://www.google.com/patents

Type of site

search

Registration

no

Owner

Google

Created by

Google

Current status

beta

Google Patents is a search engine from Google that indexes patents and patent applications from the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), which are taken from the original USPTO database (which is in the public domain). All 8 million patents have been put in the database. Optical character recognition (OCR) has been performed on the pages to make them searchable. This searchability includes all US patents and published patent applications.[1] Since August 2012, European patent documents are accessible as well.[2][3]
Contents
[hide]

1 History and background 2 Early review and criticisms 3 See also

4 References

5 External links

[edit]History

and background

The service was launched on December 14, 2006. Google says it uses "the same technology as that underlying Google Books",[4] allowing scrolling through pages, and zooming in on areas.[5]The images are saveable as PNG files.
[edit]Early

review and criticisms

The indexing is not perfect. Reportedly, as of December 14, 2006,[dated info] not all IBM patents were locatable, as searching for IBM patents retrieved only 1,197 results on Google Patents, but that IBM received nearly 3,000 patents in 2005 alone.[6] In terms of response time, the performance of Google Patents was considered in 2007 to be very good.[7]