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 ...
s and patent applications with full text from 17 patent offices, including:
*
United States Patent and Trademark Office
The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) is an agency in the U.S. Department of Commerce that serves as the national patent office and trademark registration authority for the United States. The USPTO's headquarters are in Alex ...
(USPTO),
*
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 ...
Korean Intellectual Property Office The Korean Intellectual Property Office (KIPO) is the patent office and intellectual property office of South Korea. In 2000, the name of the office was changed from "Korean Industrial Property Office" to "Korean Intellectual Property Office". It i ...
(KIPO),
*
World Intellectual Property Organization
The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO; french: link=no, Organisation mondiale de la propriété intellectuelle (OMPI)) is one of the 15 specialized agencies of the United Nations (UN). Pursuant to the 1967 Convention Establishi ...
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 ...
,
*
National Institute of Industrial Property (France)
The National Industrial Property Institute (INPI, standing for ''Institut national de la propriété industrielle'' in French) is the national intellectual property office of France, in charge of patents, trademarks and industrial design rights. I ...
,
* the
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. The agency is located in the premises of the European Patent Office (EPO), in Rijswi ...
,
* 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
Google Translate is a multilingual neural machine translation service developed by Google to translate text, documents and websites from one language into another. It offers a website interface, a mobile app for Android and iOS, and an API ...
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
(EPO) and the Prior Art Finder tool.
In 2013, it was expanded to cover
World Intellectual Property Organization
The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO; french: link=no, Organisation mondiale de la propriété intellectuelle (OMPI)) is one of the 15 specialized agencies of the United Nations (UN). Pursuant to the 1967 Convention Establishi ...
(WIPO),
German Patent Office
The German Patent and Trade Mark Office (german: Deutsches Patent- und Markenamt; abbreviation: DPMA) is the German national patent office, with headquarters in Munich, and offices in Berlin and Jena. In 2006 it employed 2556 people, of which abo ...
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).