Enhanced Patent Search Systems Revolutionize Searching

摘要

Professional patent searchers, in particular, have made gains from improvements in enhanced patent search systems from commercial sources. These improvements go well beyond what free patent databases offer and provide viable alternatives to expensive, value-added patent databases that index patent content. A regular concern for database producers and professional searchers, expressed at technology conferences and in patent blogs, is the vastly increasing numbers of patent applications filed worldwide in many languages. Patent filings for the top five patent offices within the past decade, including filings made under the Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT), show an enormous increase in filings from China, according to the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) Statistics Data Center (wipo.int/ipstats). Plus, these filings could be made in any of three Asian languages (Chinese, Japanese, or Korean) or the three official European Patent Office (EPO) languages (English, French, and German). There are four additional official publication languages for PCT filings: Arabic, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish.