I have 5 US (utility) patents, 1 Chinese.

Years ago (late 80′s, early 90′s) I was lucky enough to be within an hours driving time of the Sunnyvale, CA patent library and was able to do patent searches there. It was about the mid 90′s (as I recall) that on-line patent searches started coming on line. I think IBM had a site, then the USPTO. Being the inventor (ie knowing my own name), you would think I could easily look up my own patents. Typically though, a search just based on my own name would only yield 1 or 2 of my patents and a bunch of other patents by guys with my same name.

The Google patent search is
A) way faster than previous
B) yielded 28 results, 5 of which were mine, and if I put in my middle initial (which is in all my patents) yielded 6 results, the 6th included a patent with multiple inventors (as is typical) one with my same first and last name and one with a different name same middle initial as me (on other sites, adding my middle initial typically made things worse not better).
C) clicking on a result pulls up the associated patent which can be downloaded in Acrobat form. In the past this cost money.
D) the wealth of information and layout on this first page is quite good, and again, comes up fast.
E) you can see all other patents that reference this one and the patents cited by the selected patents.

Since I don’t do patent searches for a living, I can’t tell you if it is really optimized for searches, but for lay person, I am pretty impressed.

-John

I have 5 US (utility) patents, 1 Chinese.

Years ago (late 80′s, early 90′s) I was lucky enough to be within an hours driving time of the Sunnyvale, CA patent library and was able to do patent searches there. It was about the mid 90′s (as I recall) that on-line patent searches started coming on line. I think IBM had a site, then the USPTO. Being the inventor (ie knowing my own name), you would think I could easily look up my own patents. Typically though, a search just based on my own name would only yield 1 or 2 of my patents and a bunch of other patents by guys with my same name.

The Google patent search is
A) way faster than previous
B) yielded 28 results, 5 of which were mine, and if I put in my middle initial (which is in all my patents) yielded 6 results, the 6th included a patent with multiple inventors (as is typical) one with my same first and last name and one with a different name same middle initial as me (on other sites, adding my middle initial typically made things worse not better).
C) clicking on a result pulls up the associated patent which can be downloaded in Acrobat form. In the past this cost money.
D) the wealth of information and layout on this first page is quite good, and again, comes up fast.
E) you can see all other patents that reference this one and the patents cited by the selected patents.

Since I don’t do patent searches for a living, I can’t tell you if it is really optimized for searches, but for lay person, I am pretty impressed.

-John