Imagine patent search with Google. This could be very useful for companies if they wanted to do a preliminary search by themselves before spending thousands of dollars on a proper patent search. It allows you to search over 7 million patents from the United States Patents and Trademark Office (USPTO).
Google Patent Search covers the entire collection of patents made available by the USPTO—from patents issued in the 1790s through those issued in the middle of 2006. We don’t currently include patent applications, international patents, or U.S. patents issued over the last few months, but we look forward to expanding our coverage in the future.
As with Google Web Search, they rank patent results according to their relevance to a given search query. Google uses a number of signals to evaluate how relevant each patent is to a user's query, and we determine our results algorithmically.
It also loads very quickly and it is formatted in an easy to read format. You can also download individual patents in PDF format for later use.
It can also help you to do research on inventors by searching patents filed by the specific inventor or what sort of inventions were most popular in a specific time period.
