Google has always been striving to create applications and resources which are useful to all kinds of people and various uses. Google has recently launched an addition to their search engine by allowing their users to search through patents. There have been other established patent search websites, the most common one being the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO).

Google has indexed all the current 7 million patents which have been created and stored by the USPTO from the 1790's until the patents issued in the middle of 2006. The only room to expand is including international patents issued across the world. 

The original announcement from Google was:

Today, we're excited to be releasing the beta version of Google Patent Search, which makes it easy to search the full text of the U.S. patent corpus and find patents that interest you. Start your exploration at www.google.com/patents or visit the Advanced Patent Search page to search by criteria, including patent number, inventor, and filing date. You can view images of original patents online.

The advantages to Google's Patent Search is the fact that they provide the actual photos of the original patent and it is much easier to browse through the results when you compare it to the USPTO Search Results. Furthermore, even more people will be educated on which patents exist, and for which items the patents protect.

The Google Patent Search is powered by the same technology which is used for Google Book Search, which basically takes a snapshot of every page in nearly every book and allows you to search according to keywords which may be present in the text. Google has taken a picture of all patent information and has stored it in their database to allow others to search according to common keywords related to a patent they might be interested in.

However, the release of Google's Patent Search leads to a couple of questions, the most common one will be "Will Google offer Pay-Per-Click (PPC) listings on the search results?". At the moment there does not seem to be any sponsored listings on the Patent Search Engine Results Pages (SERP's). Nevertheless, if Google does offer sponsored listings, it might cause controversy on what type of PPC Advertisements are displayed on the Google Patent SERP's. 

Google seems to be launching numerous services which are working towards "organizing the world's information", which seems to be Google's original mission statement from the start.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, December 17th, 2006 at 6:16 pm and is filed under Search Engine News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.