Invalidation Search – Spelling Mistakes

Can anyone search this blog with its name (“My Search Strategies“)

No?

How can you reach here if you want to? forget about the other keywords that might bring you to this place

Any idea why?

Spelling mistakes!!

This is the major reason why we and the examiners miss out lots of relevant prior art.

While choosing the name of the blog I mistyped as I was in a hurry and even after wordpress confirming the name from me 3 times I missed it (happens). Similarly, there are various patents that include such misspelled words that get missed out even after multiple quality checks.

Now next time when you search keep all possible spelling variations in mind and include all possible word variations in your (keystrings or keystrngs or keystings or kystrings).

I cracked on invalidation using this strategy. If I would have not used it, I would have never been able to identify that hidden patent!!!

“Invalidation is an art not a science”

Invalidation Search – Additional Keywords

How to take the help of examiner for finding out the additional keywords (I call them lateral keywords)

Please note here I’m not talking about File Histories or ISRs to look at the keystrings used by the Examiner. The concept is to utilize the backward citations of the patent and identify the citations that are not from the same domain but still serving the same purpose. Extract the keywords from these citations and mix them with your normal keywords to obtain relevant results from different domain.

For example, there was a patent related to Location Based Service in Mobiles. For those who are not aware about LBSs, these services provide a way to identify your location (through mobile) and tell you the right path you should walk or move to reach to your destination. Something simliar to GPS. There are various patents that are build on such kind of concept, amongst which one was mine. My patent talked about calling a fixed number (XXXX), provided by a company, that end up to the customer care that is nearest to the user.

Nice concept.

I went through the backward citation and found a patent related to emergency help. The patent was not similar but the idea strike me through. I started looking for patents that are related to emergency location based service. Thats it!!..After some analysis I got the patent that I was looking for…. The patent was related to a Police Van, where a fixed number is dialed and the call is automatically routed to the nearest Police Van in the users area.

Good.

Patent Invalidated.

Invalidation Search – What’s Not Included

Everybody want to know the answers to such questions:

Where to search?
What to search?
How to search?

But nobody think about what are the things that are not searchable or the things that would be missing in your search. Here are few that are listed by Greg on his website.

What’s Not Included

Search engines include millions of pages in their databases, but none of them come close to indexing the entire Web, much less the entire Internet. Here is a list of some of what is missing:

The content in sites requiring a log in
CGI output such as data requested by a form
Intranets; pages not linked from anywhere else
Commercial resources with domain limitations
Sites that use a robots.txt file to keep files and/or directories off limits
Non-Web resources

Thats why I always say that even if you have not found anything in your search, it doesn’t mean that the patent cannot be invalidated. There are still lots of things that are/maybe present which are not seachable.

The same things applied for patentability search.

Patentability Search – Basic Utility Inventions

Please add this new source for your patentability searches.

www.halfbakery.com

This site includes lots of interesting inventions.

Sometimes we get very basic utility inventions (glowing shoe laces, bow with LED etc…) for patentability searches.. such inventions appears pretty obvious but it is difficult to find their description in patent and non-patent reference. I guess HalfBakery would be very useful in such cases.

Please click on the ’search’ option on the left menu OR directly go to http://www.halfbakery.com/search.html

This site doesn’t provides functionality of Boolean operators so complicated queries cannot be executed.

People those who use RSS readers (such as Google Reader) for reading blogs can subscribe to RSS of this site and search for inventions inside the reader itself.

Let me know if anybody is facing any difficulty in searching.

Happy hunting!!