Google adds patent search to portfolio

Angus Kidman
Friday, 15 December 2006 02:35

Your IT - Home IT

Google has added the ability to search US patent registrations to its service, a move that has attracted worldwide publicity even though the US Patent Office has had a perfectly functional search system on its own site for years.

Google Patent Search, launched in a beta version this week, can currently search through more than 7 million US patents dating from 1790. The site, which will add additional patents over time, uses the same underlying technology as Google's existing book search.

"It's a natural extension of our mission to make this public domain government information more easily accessible using Google's search technology," software engineer Doug Banks wrote on the official Google blog.

Banks was forced to edit the post after prematurely announcing enhanced printing and saving functions for the service. "We're still working on that," the update read.

While the integration into Google may attract new users curious about patents, the information isn't newly available online. The United States Patent and Trademark Office already has a search service covering the same period.