Google Patents

Google Patents
Web address patents.google.com
Type of site
 Digital library for patents
Registration Not required
Created by Google
Launched December 14, 2006 (2006-12-14)

Google Patents is a search engine from Google that indexes patents and patent applications from the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), European Patent Office (EPO), World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), Deutsches Patent- und Markenamt (DPMA), Canadian Intellectual Property Office (CIPO), and China's State Intellectual Property Office (SIPO).[1] These documents include the entire collection of granted patents and published patent applications from each database (which belong to the public domain). US patent documents date back to 1790, EPO and WIPO to 1978.[2] Optical character recognition (OCR) has been performed on the older US patents to make them searchable, and Google Translate has been used on all foreign patents to make the English translations searchable.

History and background

The service was launched on December 14, 2006. Google says it uses "the same technology as that underlying Google Books",[3] allowing scrolling through pages, and zooming in on areas.[4] The images are saveable as PNG files.

Google Patents was updated in 2012 with coverage of the European Patent Office (EPO) and the Prior Art Finder tool.[5]

In 2013, it was expanded to cover World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), Deutsches_Patent-_und_Markenamt (DPMA), Canadian Intellectual Property Office (CIPO), and China's State Intellectual Property Office (SIPO). All foreign patents were also translated to English and made searchable.[6]

In 2015, a new version was introduced at patents.google.com with a new UI, integration of Google Scholar with machine-classified with Cooperative Patent Classifications (CPCs), and search result clustering into CPCs.[7]

References

External links

This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the Saturday, March 12, 2016. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.