Many people use class based search, I have also mentioned it as one of the base strategy.

What I would suggest is after you done a thorough search in IPC and US classes you should also go for ECLA – European Classification.

You can search for your relevant ECLAs here

European Classification has been derived from IPC and is narrower than that. So the chances of digging into narrower domain are easier.

Benefit: Increased relevancy
Disadvantage: Search scope limited to European patents

Believe me it would be a beneficial strategy for you…

Invalidation, Invalidation and Invalidation…

I am sorry for not being on roll for sometime… you know when you receive an invalidation you cannot think of anything else other than invalidating that patent with a prior art…

So I’m back again with lots of new strategies.

I think, it’s a big limitation that the scope of the invalidation search is limited by the words that the searcher can think of…

However, the art of search says that you have to find a literature that has not necessarily been described in the same words that you are using.

So the question arises, how to come up with new words?

Google Sets!!

Though it is still in labs but it is very useful.

So now you have more related keywords!!

Google Sets identifies new keywords from 1000s of WebPages available on Internet. Now the good point of this strategy is that you get to know about lots of related words that are being used and written by other people around the world.

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….