Patent Info Sources

Since some SolidWorks users work on their own patents or try to find
patentable solutions, I thought I'ld mention something I found that
some engineer friends have MISSED.

Using the USPTO.gov site is less friendly for basic searching in some
ways, at least when you want to look at just a few patents.

Google now has a section called "Patents" (under MORE).

The neat thing about Google's results is that you get a thumbnail of
the front page which blows up to the full front page when you search,
which USPTO.gov does not do in the initial page results.

Lots of users of the USPTO.gov site, I've found don't know how useful
the Advanced search is in finding relevant prior art AFTER THEY FIND A
RELEVANT PATENT.

If you copy down a patent number on something you think is relevant to
your work, and it is 4,000,007, that doesn't tell you much. But in
Advanced if you do a query on "REF/4,000,007" you will get a list of 13
patents which issued AFTER 4,000,007 which refer to it as prior art,
and which are certainly relevant to search through.

For fee patent databases for people doing serious work include
Delphion.com & http://derwent.com/.

 

Bo,
This is also a great patent source, in that you can download/print pdfs of
the entire patent (unlike the USPTO). Also, the print quality of these pdfs
seems a little better than the printouts from google.
http://www.freepatentsonline.com/

 

MS, yes I have seen the site you noted.

When I need 5 to 100 patents at a time, I use a small program on the
Mac called "Patent Grabber" <http://www.blazingdawn.com/>, which will
pull down entire patents in either pdf or tiff images from USPTO.gov,
and it does it at a speed of maybe a page every 3-5 seconds on my DSL,
meaning I don't have to do it manually. Saves my sanity

There are similar Windows programs to do the same thing.

Bo