Google Patents is a search engine

Search engine

A search engine is an information retrieval system designed to help find information stored on a computer system. The search results are usually presented in a list and are commonly called hits. Search engines help to minimize the time required to find information and the amount of information...

 from Google

Google

Google Inc. is an American multinational public corporation invested in Internet search, cloud computing, and advertising technologies. Google hosts and develops a number of Internet-based services and products, and generates profit primarily from advertising through its AdWords program...

 that indexes patents and patent applications from the United States Patent and Trademark Office

United States Patent and Trademark Office

The United States Patent and Trademark Office is an agency in the United States Department of Commerce that issues patents to inventors and businesses for their inventions, and trademark registration for product and intellectual property identification.The USPTO is based in Alexandria, Virginia,...

 (USPTO), which are taken from the original USPTO database (which is in the public domain

Public domain

Works are in the public domain if the intellectual property rights have expired, if the intellectual property rights are forfeited, or if they are not covered by intellectual property rights at all...

). All 8 million patents have been put in the database. Optical character recognition

Optical character recognition

Optical character recognition, usually abbreviated to OCR, is the mechanical or electronic translation of scanned images of handwritten, typewritten or printed text into machine-encoded text. It is widely used to convert books and documents into electronic files, to computerize a record-keeping...

 (OCR) has been performed on the pages to make them search

Web search engine

A web search engine is designed to search for information on the World Wide Web and FTP servers. The search results are generally presented in a list of results often referred to as SERPS, or "search engine results pages". The information may consist of web pages, images, information and other...

able. This searchability includes all US patents and published patent applications.

History and background

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

Review and criticisms

The indexing is not perfect. Reportedly, as of December 14, 2006, 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.

In terms of response time, the performance of Google Patents is considered to be very good.

External links

• Google Patents main entry point to subject service