The battle for technological dominance is increasing day by day and a new era of intellectual property rights has arrived, marked by ever-expanding court battles over patent claims with billions of dollars at stake. In such a scenario, the role of a patent search service provider like Sagacious Research has become more prominent because just a cursory search of patents could put a company involved in any litigation at risk.

However, the good news is that the domain of patent and patent search has changed a lot in last few years and there has been cut-throat competition between companies to achieve top spot in this field. The demand of time is that patent research service should be comprehensive, accurate and fruitful and thanks to new updates to patent search software and databases which have enabled patent search firms like Sagacious Research to do their patent related searches comprehensively and with more accuracy.

With the advent of New Year, we all race to the nearest mall to shop for holiday gifts for the important people in our lives.Patent searchers enjoy getting presents too, and each database update is a small gift of new features and tools to improve the prior art search and analysis processes.New databases and search tools are the equivalent to new i-Phones or Xbox, and searchers can’t wait to take the new system out for a test ride.

After having spent a decade providing patent support services, Sagacious Research will like to highlight a few of the major patent search gifts that we’ve all received in the last twelve months, including updates and new platforms for both free and subscription patent search systems. Over the past one year, there have been notable upgrades in the way searchers have evolved themselves, keeping in mind the ongoing lawsuit trends and updates in patent laws. The same upgrades are reflected in the available or newly emerged patent databases to suit the needs of the searchers.

2015’s Top three updates in the available major patent search databases have been discussed below:

1. Smart Search in Thomson Innovation: Smart Search is a patent-pending semantic search tool that gives users meaningful and relevant results just by entering a few simple search terms. Just enter up to five words or phrases and click search. Your results will appear, ranked in order of relevancy based on how closely they relate to your search strategy. There is no need to spend time trying to identify all the different ways a concept or invention can be described – Smart Search does that for you. Search queries can be entered in English, many European languages, and Japanese. Smart Search translates the query and identifies patents and applications that include search terms, even if they are in another language.

In simpler Words, Smart Search = GOOGLE™, BING™ OR YAHOO!™ FOR PATENT SEARCHING

2. Google’s  Integrated Prior Art Finder Tool And Google Scholar: Google recently launched a new version of the Google Patents search, which also incorporates providing related results of non-patent art and Google Scholar citations. The idea is that the new patent search will be easier to use both by experts in the field as well as the general public to look for patents and related materials. Given the rising interest in safeguarding IP among developers and founders who may have never had to consider patents much before, this could prove to be especially useful. The update covers three areas:

• Single Search Interface: Google integrated both searches for patents as well as non-patent art, the latter being one of the main ways that people will look for when deciding whether the idea has been patented or disclosed earlier.
• CPC indexed Google Scholar database: Google has indexed the whole of its Google Scholar database using CPC Classifications.
• Clustered results based on CPCs: It presents the results in clusters, logical groups that will make it easier to look at results around themes. This also allows a user to drill down into relevant technical areas without having to understand the CPC system.  From these clusters, searches can be further refined with additional keywords or other parameters (like filing/publication date, inventor/assignee, legal status, citations etc.)

3. Questel Orbit’s Semantic Search

Questel Orbit releases updates round the year to fix bugs and continuously tweaks the interface for easy maneuverability. Recently it has released a new semantic search option in its update. This allows users to enter large bodies of text and the system algorithm helps find patents that are similar to the entered text. One can say that Orbit has tried to incorporate Google search engine’s method inside its huge database of patents from more than 100 countries.

 It works by taking a search query (text) as input and on the basis of input it provides you with a list of concepts. The user then has the option of filtering and choosing the concepts relevant to his filed of search. On the basis of concepts chosen, the database again presents a list of documents falling in that concept category in the order of relevance. The user can again tick the most relevant patents from the list and then in next step, database runs a similar search to provide a list of all documents that are similar to the documents that were ticked in the earlier step. Although the process of conducting search through this option is a little time consuming, it saves the trouble of using and developing complex search strings and operators.

This is just a small extract from the numerous patent search database updates for patent searchers during 2015. 2015 has brought many other updates in both free and subscription search tools in terms of Full Text jurisdiction coverage, new UIs, better analytic tools, translation features etc.

In the nutshell, it seems 2015 has been a year where patent search databases has been mainly involved in providing smart search solutions to capture market for both rookie and professional searchers. This year has been really exciting for searchers because of increased number of patent litigations filed as compared to 2014. The rapidly growing competition amongst search database providers will bloom many new updates in next year.  Patent Search Tools

See you all in 2016 and wishing you a very Happy New Year.