Google Launches Patents Database

Using scanning technology from Google Books, yesterday Google has launched a new searchable database of U.S. patents at google.com/patents. The blog post has been updated to note some problems with printing and saving, but this is an impressive collection of 7 million patents from the 1790s through to the middle of 2006, with plans to add more recent patents. While there have been many other free patent databases for well over a decade, Google's popularity may help push their version. It has few of the features that a professional patent search might want, but it can help the rest of us dig into the patent literature. Unlike some other Google databases, Patents starts out with an advanced interface for searching a few of the specific fields like It also includes some specialized prefixes, listed on the about page, such as uspclass:, intlpclass:, inassignee:, ininventor:, and patent: (for patent number searching). Date limits for issue and filing date are available.

As is so typical of Google, no date sorting is available. Want to find the latest patents on some topic? Try the date limits in the advanced search and browse the whole set. Like in Google Scholar, Google is confident that can deliver better relevance by not allowing searchers to ever sort by date. Gary points out some other issues and links to a variety of other patent database. Over at the new Search Engine Land is another detailed look with an revealing comparison of the number of results that Google gives compared to the patent office for recent years. This is, of course, in beta, so expect many strange problems like this. Also, if you are looking for very old patents, do not trust the optical character recognition to be very accurate. When limiting to old patents, I quickly came across this fascinating 1906 one for Method of Making Dynamo-Bkttshes by a Geobg Preuss. Or at least that is how Google scanned it. Look at the patent itself to see that it should be Method of Making Dynamo-Brushes by Georg Preuss. More disturbing is that the issue date that Google shows, December 18, 1808, in the actual image looks a lot more like Dec. 15, 1908 -- only a few days plus a century off. See the screenshot below: