Google
Google LLC () is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company focusing on Search Engine, search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, software, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, ar ...
that indexes
patent
A patent is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the legal right to exclude others from making, using, or selling an invention for a limited period of time in exchange for publishing an enabling disclosure of the invention."A ...
s and patent applications.
Contents
Google Patents indexes more than 87 million
patent
A patent is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the legal right to exclude others from making, using, or selling an invention for a limited period of time in exchange for publishing an enabling disclosure of the invention."A ...
European Patent Office
The European Patent Office (EPO) is one of the two organs of the European Patent Organisation (EPOrg), the other being the Administrative Council. The EPO acts as executive body for the organisation
(EPO),
* China's
National Intellectual Property Administration
The China National Intellectual Property Administration (CNIPA; ), also known as the Chinese Patent Office, is the patent office of the People's Republic of China (PRC). It was founded in 1980 as the Patent Office of the People's Republic of Ch ...
Rospatent
The Federal Service for Intellectual Property, commonly known as Rospatent (russian: Федеральная служба по интеллектуальной собственности (Роспатент), Federalnaya sluzhba po intellektualn ...
,
*
Intellectual Property Office (United Kingdom)
The Intellectual Property Office of the United Kingdom (often referred to as the UK IPO) is, since 2 April 2007, the operating name of The Patent Office. It is the official government body responsible for intellectual property rights in the UK ...
Netherlands Patent Office The Netherlands Patent Office ( nl, Octrooicentrum Nederland) is the patent office of the Netherlands. It is an agency of the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs (Netherlands), Ministry of Economic Affairs. The agency is located in the premises of th ...
,
* offices of Spain, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, and Luxembourg.
These documents include the entire collection of granted patents and published patent applications from each database (which belong to the
public domain
The public domain (PD) consists of all the creative work to which no exclusive intellectual property rights apply. Those rights may have expired, been forfeited, expressly waived, or may be inapplicable. Because those rights have expired ...
). US patent documents date back to 1790, EPO and WIPO to 1978.
Optical character recognition
Optical character recognition or optical character reader (OCR) is the electronic or mechanical conversion of images of typed, handwritten or printed text into machine-encoded text, whether from a scanned document, a photo of a document, a sc ...
(OCR) has been performed on the older US patents to make them searchable, and Google Translate has been used on all non-English patents to make the English translations searchable.
Google Patents also indexes documents from
Google Scholar
Google Scholar is a freely accessible web search engine that indexes the full text or metadata of scholarly literature across an array of publishing formats and disciplines. Released in beta in November 2004, the Google Scholar index includes ...
and
Google Books
Google Books (previously known as Google Book Search, Google Print, and by its code-name Project Ocean) is a service from Google Inc. that searches the full text of books and magazines that Google has scanned, converted to text using optical ...
, and has machine-classified them with
Cooperative Patent Classification
The Cooperative Patent Classification (CPC) is a patent classification system, which has been jointly developed by the European Patent Office (EPO) and the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO).
History and background
The service was launched on December 14, 2006. Google says it uses "the same technology as that underlying
Google Books
Google Books (previously known as Google Book Search, Google Print, and by its code-name Project Ocean) is a service from Google Inc. that searches the full text of books and magazines that Google has scanned, converted to text using optical ...
", allowing scrolling through pages, and zooming in on areas. The images are saveable as PNG files.
Google Patents was updated in 2012 with coverage of the
European Patent Office
The European Patent Office (EPO) is one of the two organs of the European Patent Organisation (EPOrg), the other being the Administrative Council. The EPO acts as executive body for the organisation
National Intellectual Property Administration
The China National Intellectual Property Administration (CNIPA; ), also known as the Chinese Patent Office, is the patent office of the People's Republic of China (PRC). It was founded in 1980 as the Patent Office of the People's Republic of Ch ...
(CNIPA). All foreign patents were also translated to English and made searchable.
In 2015, a new version was introduced at patents.google.com with a new UI, integration of
Google Scholar
Google Scholar is a freely accessible web search engine that indexes the full text or metadata of scholarly literature across an array of publishing formats and disciplines. Released in beta in November 2004, the Google Scholar index includes ...
with machine-classified with
Cooperative Patent Classification
The Cooperative Patent Classification (CPC) is a patent classification system, which has been jointly developed by the European Patent Office (EPO) and the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO).