Get the feeling that events happen in "Waves" - and tonight it's a Wave of Search announcements including the release of Google Patent Search - which is probably more important than what it sounds like. I first read about Google Patent Search by reading Xeni Jardin's post on Boing Boing today.
Not being a Patent Attorney - I have never really had to research a Patent to see if its' unique - but I know anytime there's an idea, invention - it's really important to do the research on the Patent and get the Patent to be well written.
Search for patents of Lasik Lasers and you can see all kinds of Patents (as well as how patents are written) and how much competition there is on term your searching for (IE: Thermal Devices had 1233 patents when I searched today and Search Engines had 1001 patents).
I suppose you can use Google Patent search a couple of ways:
a. if your developing a product or service - maybe you'd like to see what's out there in terms of patents and figure out if it's even worth trying to patent your idea.
b. crawl the patent search results for a term to extract the keywords - there could be times where you'd want to do this.
c. if your researching search engines, for example - you might just want to get an idea of every patent you can get your hands on.
A couple of things:
1. How are Patents ranked? Is there a ranking algo for this and what would it be (how well the patent is written?).
2. Not all the patents show up - some of the search results end up with a 404 message that the document is not found on this server.
3. It seems to me only a fraction of the actual number of patents out there are being searched right now - maybe the service is so new the patent search index is not that populated as yet.
I think a service like this is revolutionary - but you probably won't notice the effects for a year or two - and I think Patent Attorneys and Lawyers will the among the first users -as well as scientists and researchers.
Let's wait a year and see what happens with Google Patent Search - it will, for sure, get a lot much more press as time goes on.
