[SEL] patent search

[Arnie Fero]

Hi Tom,

That's a really good summary of the "patent search problem."

Fortunatly, there may be a solution.  We have a number of folks on the
list who enjoy the "seven day weekend."  Clearly winter is a slack time
for them.  Perhaps they could spend some time doing a service that would
benefit everyone.

All they would need to do is to download and save the first text page of
each patent.  Then use OCR software (like the one that comes with a
scanner) to convert that page to searchable text.  Then they put all of
that info into one big file that we could search.

Easy peasy.  Do we have a volunteer?

See ya,  Arnie

On Thu, 20 Jan 2005 Germoamer at aol.com wrote:

> It is time consuming finding patents with just the date especially with a
> slow country connection, but I have done it and have had others help doing it
> too.  Go to patent office:
>
> http://patft.uspto.gov/netahtml/srchnum.htm
>
> Type in a "guess" patent number in the "query" box. For example, type in
> 400000 and see what happens.
> Next page click on "images"
> This will bring up the patent and date. Patent item March 19, 1989
> Keep making up numbers until you find the number for the patent date you are
> looking for.
> Once you find a number that matches the date, then go back or forward
> adding/subtracting one number at a time until you find the patent that matches the
> item you are looking for.  In your case a sparkplug.  There might be several
> hundred patents issued for that date because from what I can observe, all patents
> issued for a particular week are given a patent date of that Monday.
>
> There may be a simpler way, but I have not found it.