There are multiple tools available over the internet to check the similarity of a claim or a patent. There are pros and cons of every tool and a user can sometimes have a hard time deciding what to use where. In such situations, people tend to use the services they trust. People tend to rely on big tech companies when it comes to choosing between a variety of options because they are perceived to be doing well in every area. Such is the case with Google Patents.

Although Google Patents is a well all-round search engine for patent data, it does have some disadvantages. In this article, we will have a look at some of the more obvious cons of Google Patents and will also proceed to look at some other services available online. And if you are not familiar with the concepts of patent search or how to conduct a patent search, have a look at our article Patent Search.

Some Shortfalls of Google Patents

This article is not aimed at disregarding Google Patents as a search engine for patents, instead, the goal of this article is to get the reader familiar with some alternatives to using Google Patents. So, let’s, first of all, discuss why one might decide to not use Google Patents.

1. Semi Semantic Behavior

Google Patents has been observed to show semi-semantic behavior. It is a keyword-based search at its core but it can extract some semantically similar results. Sometimes it can be useful but most of the time it searches for unrelated synonyms. Following is an example of this behavior.

It is not necessarily bad behavior but it does affect the results.

2. Bad with Acronyms

As with all keyword-based searches, Google Patents also seem to struggle with the acronyms. The most common example of it is the acronym AIDS (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome) which is often misinterpreted with the word “aids”, a verb with the meaning of “to help”. So you might get a lot of false positives if your query contains such acronyms.

3. Empty Results

Google Patents shows the keyword search behavior here as well. If the keywords are very unique then it might show zero results. Semantic search engines usually shine in this department but Google Patents is not one of them.

4. Unable to Process Scientific Jargon

Patents usually cover complex novel scientific inventions and thus have a lot of “science language”, but it is observed that Google Patents is usually unable to get results if queried with scientific jargon for example chemical formulas, etc.

5. Missing Citations

There’s been a case of some missing patents which occurred during data transfer. Due to this, citations are missing in some of the patents.

6. Disclosure Risk

Google tracks its search activity according to its Privacy Policy. According to MPEP 904.02(c) of Manual of Patent Examining Procedure by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), examiners are allowed to use tools and the internet to search for the prior art of any claim under examination but are not allowed to use any proprietary information as query, instead, they are advised to use a general state of the art query to get similar results. Simply put, to check whether the claim under inspection is similar or identical to any published claim, you can use any service on the internet but you shouldn’t provide any information about the claim that might expose its privacy. Since Google Patents is a keyword-based search, it is difficult to come up with a query that maintains the balance of the privacy of your claims and search for any similar or identical existing claim. Thus your case might always be at risk if Google Patents is being used.

I think these are more than enough reasons to try something different this time. Let’s now discuss some of the alternatives to Google Patents.

Patentscope

Patentscope is a patent search service by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). You can search over 92 million patents worldwide and can also enhance your search results by filtering them using certain meta-level filters. It is a free global search engine technology information. It doesn’t employ any spelling correction technique nor does it enable to use chemical compounds as a query on the open version. Also, it strictly searches for words in the query and not their other forms, so no lemmatization is observed. It also returns zero results if even one word in the query is out of its vocabulary.

Escapenet

Escapenet by European Patent Office (EPO) is also a keyword-based patent search on over 120 million patents. It has all the characteristics of keyword search such as advanced search features and metadata-based filters. Unlike Patentscope, it uses lemmatization to get different word forms too and supports multiple European languages. The base search only allows up to 10 keywords.

lens.org

lens.org provides search services for different scholarly datasets including patent data of 125.4 million patent records. It has very fine-grained advanced search filters and has patents from all around the world. It uses Apache Lucene and Elasticsearch for text search and shows a semi-semantic behavior. It also supports spelling correction and handles acronyms better than the previous two options. Still, it doesn’t search for chemical compounds, etc, and is susceptible to return empty results.

Traindex

Traindex is a semantic search engine, unlike others in this list. It uses Machine Learning to find patents that are semantically similar to the query. It searches over Google Public Patents Data and can be integrated very easily into your applications. It can accept texts of various lengths, you can enter whole patent documents and it will handle that easily. Since it is a semantic search engine, it outstands in retrieving desired results for even a very unique set of queries. One of the things that make it stand out is that it doesn’t track search data and lets you use their API safely. Does this look like something you want to know more about? How about you schedule a demo here and we will walk you through the process.

The goal of this article was to point out some areas where Google Patents falls short and to provide you with some alternative resources so you can use the right tool for your problems, without compromising privacy and security. If you’re still confused, you can reach us at help@traindex.io and we would be happy to guide you more.