Patent searching

[Joe Gwinn]

Google has done it again. They recently added a patent-search option. Given that the US patent office already does this, why bother? Because Google allows searches by inventor name, et al, all the way back to 1790, unlike the US patent office, which stops at 1976. This is a significant improvement because many pickup designs came out in the 1950s.

http://www.google.com/patents

And we still have PAT2PDF to obtain pdf copies of patents: http://www.pat2pdf.org/

[David Schwab]

Very cool! The US Patent Office's search feature is a pain.

Thanks for the info!

[Joe Gwinn]

I just tried a real search of patents from the 1920s using Google Patents. It does work, but is very porous, because of the many spelling errors caused by imperfect OCR (optical character recognition) of admittedly noisy, imperfect printing.

So, go at the question from multiple angles, in hopes of evading the OCR noise.

[Possum]

yeh...

I noticed that, click on the advanced search which helps. Anytime you find a good patent its good to search the patent numbers listed as references quoted, you can find some good stuff that way.