Patent searches

JimIvey

I use the one at the Patent Office:
http://www.uspto.gov/patft/index.html

I don't know of any bots.  It shouldn't be too hard to write one.  

Would they come?  Maybe.  I'm not sure it would be considered essential for practitioners or applicants, but maybe for scholars, media, and special interest groups like EFF.  I'm not sure how big a market that is.

It might be more interesting (for all constituencies) to see what applications are coming, so maybe an application bot would be more in demand.

Regards.

larkas

As always with the law, it depends. If you could clarify (without specfic details about the exact search), we could give you better advice and more free sites.

What are you searching for? US patents? or international (Canada, EU, Japanese, etc) patents? other written prior art (e.g. IEEE articles)?

The answer also depends on the purpose for the search. Are you trying to do: a novelty opinion (i.e. check to see if something is probably patentable)? a state of the art search so you can see what technology you may want to use to get a particular result?  an infringement search including knock out prior art (as would be the case if you are/or potentially will be a defendant in a patent infringement suit)?

IBM did have a great service. Unforntunately, it became so popular that it became commercialized and is now Delphion (by Thomson). Basic registration is free along with training for using it. The free version only lets you retrieve US granted patents. It also has international patents and published applications, along with US published applications for a fee. As I recall, with the paid version, you can set up a bot to search it repeadly like Eclipse(TM) on LexisNexis.

http://www.delphion.com

Most of the services used by practicioners (except the  USPTO's database)  are commercialized and expensive. Derwent comes to mind.

http://www.derwent.com

Also check out Lexis One (register for free) and check for intellectual property links. Also, check out  the links in the PatentBar group on Yahoo. Once again, you will need to register for free.

http://www.lexisone.com
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/PatentBar/

vigile

another free website to search the almost worldwide patents which i usually use is http://ep.espacenet.com/. but you can  just retrieve the patents what epo collects, that means some of them can only provide you the necessary information and some of them are in full .pdf format opened by acrobat reader.

M. Arth...

Whenever a product is going to be, or is commercial, I use an outside seacher. Not only do I get a profession experience in  searching but the searcher also checks with Examiners for insight and further leads such as non patent references.

This technique has never had a negative bounce for decades and if there were I'd have a finger to point to rather than being fully to blame.

JimIvey

advice of using a professional search service is good advice, particularly if you're to rely on the search for some reason -- such as a Petition to Make Special in which you're to submit results of a pre-examination search.

I learned long ago that searching is an entirely different skill than analyzing and writing patents and that I can't do it cost-effectively.

Regards.