Patent Search
Before you start inventing, creating, investing and publishing you should do a patent search to see if anyone else came up with the same idea and has patented it already.
While it is usually a good idea to let a patent attorney handle the research, anyone can get a quick overview individually and completely without additional costs.
One website that supports patent searches is Patents.com, a simple free website that lets you search US Patents, US Design Patents, US Patent Applications and European Patents. The search supports the basic Boolean operators AND, OR and NOT.
Instead of entering text you can also enter an application, publication or patent number right away and search for inventors, attorneys, agents, assignees and owners.
Three additional search forms are available.
The advanced search accepts a data range and additional variables like the assistant and primary examiner or foreign references.
Expert Search combines abbreviations with wildcards and special searches allowing advanced and complex queries. Bulk Search finally allows to search for multiple patents at once by using a comma delimited list of patent numbers.
Alternatives would be to search the US Patent Office database directly which uses an awful interface from the 90s, or the patent search options provided by Google or the European patent office.
One area where Patents.com fails is information that reveals the source or sources the company uses to fill the database. Are they as reliable as the official sources? How often are their patents updated, do they always publish the latest right away? Questions that only a patent attorney could answer.
The patent search engines enable you to research a topic of interest, either because you want to initially check if your idea has not been patented before, or if you are interested into a topic and want to learn more about it.
Update: The Patent.com website changed in recent time. While you can still run a search for patents using it, it limits access to a basic search option and has removed advanced and expert search options from the site.
Doesn’t Windows 8 know that www. or http:// are passe ?
Well it is a bit difficulty to distinguish between name.com domains and files for instance.
I know a service made by google that is similar to Google bookmarks.
http://www.google.com/saved
@Ashwin–Thankful you delighted my comment; who knows how many “gamers” would have disagreed!
@Martin
The comments section under this very article (3 comments) is identical to the comments section found under the following article:
https://www.ghacks.net/2023/08/15/netflix-is-testing-game-streaming-on-tvs-and-computers/
Not sure what the issue is, but have seen this issue under some other articles recently but did not report it back then.
Omg a badge!!!
Some tangible reward lmao.
It sucks that redditors are going to love the fuck out of it too.
With the cloud, there is no such thing as unlimited storage or privacy. Stop relying on these tech scums. Purchase your own hardware and develop your own solutions.
This is a certified reddit cringe moment. Hilarious how the article’s author tries to dress it up like it’s anything more than a png for doing the reddit corporation’s moderation work for free (or for bribes from companies and political groups)
Almost al unlmited services have a real limit.
And this comment is written on the dropbox article from August 25, 2023.
First comment > @ilev said on August 4, 2012 at 7:53 pm
For the God’s sake, fix the comments soon please! :[
Yes. Please. Fix the comments.
With Google Chrome, it’s only been 1,500 for some time now.
Anyone who wants to force me in such a way into buying something that I can get elsewhere for free will certainly never see a single dime from my side. I don’t even know how stupid their marketing department is to impose these limits on users instead of offering a valuable product to the paying faction. But they don’t. Even if you pay, you get something that is also available for free elsewhere.
The algorithm has also become less and less savvy in terms of e.g. English/German translations. It used to be that the bot could sort of sense what you were trying to say and put it into different colloquialisms, which was even fun because it was like, “I know what you’re trying to say here, how about…” Now it’s in parts too stupid to translate the simplest sentences correctly, and the suggestions it makes are at times as moronic as those made by Google Translations.
If this is a deep-learning AI that learns from users’ translations and the phrases they choose most often – which, by the way, is a valuable, moneys worthwhile contribution of every free user to this project: They invest their time and texts, thereby providing the necessary data for the AI to do the thing as nicely as they brag about it in the first place – alas, the more unprofessional users discovered the translator, the worse the language of this deep-learning bot has become, the greater the aggregate of linguistically illiterate users has become, and the worse the language of this deep-learning bot has become, as it now learns the drivel of every Tom, Dick and Harry out there, which is why I now get their Mickey Mouse language as suggestions: the inane language of people who can barely spell the alphabet, it seems.
And as a thank you for our time and effort in helping them and their AI learn, they’ve lowered the limit from what was once 5,000 to now 1,500…? A big “fuck off” from here for that! Not a brass farthing from me for this attitude and behaviour, not in a hundred years.