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.

Invalidation Search – Google Timeline View

During Invalidation sometime it becomes very difficult to hunt for non-patent references on Google. As Google provide results based on the page rank.

A very good technique to avoid this problem is by using Timeline View from Google Experimental Lab.

You need to go to Experimental Lab of Google and join the Timeline view experiment. Thereafter, all the search that you will conduct on Google will be performed under this experiment.

Advantages:

Good tool in Patentability and Invalidations
Good tool for conducting market analysis for a patent
Good tool for identifying the growth in a particular technology
Good tool for learning about history of a particular invention/product
Good tool for identifying the lauch of a particular product
A timeline chart showing the growth or drop in number of results

Please note that the results shown under a particular year in the chart doesn’t implies that they were published in that particular year. For example, the result talking about a technology in 1995 doesn’t implies that reference was published in 1995. But it provides enough hints to modify the future search to reach the exact reference for that particular year.

Invalidation Search – More Keywords

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.

My Tenth Strategy

People love Delphion…

Even i do..

But there are many things that Delphion doesn’t provide but other databases are very good at it…

For example, we all know that the old USPTO patents (early 1900s) are available in the image format and their text is not searchable. Further, we also know that they are not much useful when you are searching for some new technologies, such as mobile communication and semiconductors. However, they can turn out to be very important when the search is related to some new design. We never know if that design had already been patented by some person way back in early 1900s.

These early patents are not searchable on Delphion but these patents can be very easily covered by the databases such as Micropat and Google Patents who use their OCR (Optical Character Recognition) technology to bring these patents out in search results.

Recently we found very close prior art using this technique, which we used to invalidate one patent.

We can never take changes in invalidation so do use different techniques, we never know which strategy can yield good result.

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.