TIPS AND INSTRUCTIONS FOR SEARCHING ON-LINE

The United States Patent & Trademark Office (USPTO) maintains an extensive website (www.uspto.gov) which includes a text-searchable database of all Patents issued since approximately 1974. Patents from any year can be downloaded as images and printed from your computer.

The Patent Office uses a special image file format which is a European version of the TIFF file format. In order to view image documents, you will first have to download the TIFF driver and install it in your computer. A free version of the TIFF driver can be found at: www.alternatiff.com

The advanced Boolean search page of the Patent Office can be found at:

http://patft.uspto.gov/netahtml/search-adv.htm

Scroll down this page to view field definitions. If you are familiar with text searching engines at all, as well as Boolean operators (e.g., AND, OR, NOT, etc.) you’ll have no trouble using this “advanced” search page. The search engine can handle some fairly complex search requests.

Once you have found a relevant patent, you can view the patent text by clicking on the patent number. Click on the “IMAGES” icon to view the whole image of the patent, one page at a time.

Each patent is classified in a class and subclass. Once you have found one relevant patent, you can search that entire class or subclass by using the class identifier field searches (e.g., CCL/365/73 to search class 365 subclass 73). You can AND or OR these with text search words or with other classes.

EXAMPLE SEARCH

Suppose we want to look for a patent for an automatic dog water dish filling device

We might search on the terms DOG and DISH and WATER and AUTOMATIC as shown at the right here.

Note that we have reset the “Select Years” indicator to “All Years”. This is very important as otherwise your search will encompass only recent years.

Unfortunately, the initial search results produce a large number of irrelevant patents. We need to narrow our field of search. One way is to look for certain words only in the TITLE (TTL/) or Abstract (ABST/). By ANDing our original search with “and TTL/DOG”, we narrow the scope of the search considerably – perhaps too narrow!

This narrowed search now gives us three relevant Patents. However, our search need not end here. Once you find one relevant Patent, it will lead you to others in at least two ways.

If we have successfully loaded the AlternaTIFF driver, we can download one of these patents, page by page and review it for relevancy.

If we look at the first Patent in this list, we see that it was classified in class 119 subclass 51.11. We also see that a number of references were cited during prosecution of this patent. We can download these references by using the search modifier “PN/” and then the patent number desired, without the commas. We can also perform a class/subclass search on the class this Patent was classifed in. We can also AND or OR or NOT any classification with any combination of words.

To search by class and subclass of this patent we would enter “CCL/119.51.11”.

To find the first Patent cited in this Patent, we would enter “PN/3587530”. Remember to select “all years” or you may get a “not found” error!

As you can see, the process is endless, although you’ll probably find the most relevant references early on.

The Patent Office Search site has an easy-to use help page for different field modifiers. Just scroll down from the main Advanced Boolean Search Page, and click on the filed modifier to see how it works.

Field Code	Field Name	Field Code	Field Name
PN	Patent Number	IN	Inventor Name
ISD	Issue Date	IC	Inventor City
TTL	Title	IS	Inventor State
ABST	Abstract	ICN	Inventor Country
ACLM	Claim(s)	LREP	Attorney or Agent
SPEC	Description/Specification	AN	Assignee Name
CCL	Current US Classification	AC	Assignee City
ICL	International Classification	AS	Assignee State
APN	Application Serial Number	ACN	Assignee Country
APD	Application Date	EXP	Primary Examiner
PARN	Parent Case Information	EXA	Assistant Examiner
RLAP	Related US App. Data	REF	Referenced By
REIS	Reissue Data	FREF	Foreign References
PRIR	Foreign Priority	OREF	Other References
PCT	PCT Information	GOVT	Government Interest
APT	Application Type

In the space provided here, I cannot give you every search tip imaginable. I can only say that the more you search, the better you’ll get at it.

There is no requirement that you perform a Prior Art search. If you do, be sure to cite all relevant references to the United States Patent Office when you file your application. If a reference is irrelevant, discard it. The worse thing you can do is keep uncited, irrelevant references in your personal Patent files. See my Article on Patent File Hygiene for more information.

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