My Ninth Strategy…

No matter what kind of search we have to do, whether its an invalidaiton search, patentability assessment, freedom to operate or any other type of search, most of the people I have seen are always looking for some new high-end database for patent searching, such as Delphion, Micropat, Patbase, Patent Cafe etc.

No doubt these databases are very good, but a good database not just determined by the no. of jurisdictions it covers but by the algorithm it uses.

As a search strategy always use Google Patents after you have performed a search on these big shots databases. Since the algorithm used by Google patents is completely different it will provide you with different results as compared to what you have already analzyed in Delphion and the like.

So as a rule never stick to just one database.

My Eighth Strategy

We all follow inventor based strategy…

But here is the important thing that we all should look for…

I followed this in one of my project and found this really very useful where we invalidated a patent by using a paragraph from one of an earlier patent of the inventor (of the subject patent).

Usually when an inventor files for a patent there is a high probability that he provides a brief description or an idea about his coming invention (knowingly or unknowingly). Therefore, whenever we are analyzing the past patents of the relevant inventors, always make sure that you go through the description in detail. You would always find some links in there…

Though this is not going to be useful in everycase but yes we never know which strategy may give us a good result!!

Keep searching…

My seventh strategy…

As we discussed about the use of Derwent database as one of the search strategy, there is an efficient way to do it. I would recommended to first perform a search on general database (Delphion) before moving on to Derwent.

This provides the searcher a feel of the results (what already exist in the domaiin) and the various keywords to use, which inturn helps in making the query more efficient and most important complete.

My sixth search strategy…

I guess alomost everybody here must have used delphion..

Used keyword based search ….

Browsed through 1000s of patent publications to find out the relevant results…

We all know Derwent but very few of us have tried it…

My personal experience, in case of invalidation search, always try atleast two queries on Derwent…

It will always be beneficial..

My Fifth Strategy

Used IPCs… yeah…

Has anybody tried using combination of IPCs…

For example, combining one IPC with other to know what all patent publications fall under both of them…

I bet you will get more relevant results….