Searching patents with Search Visualisersearchvisualiser.com/Content/PDFs/Searching patents... ·...

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Searching patents with Search Visualiser By Gordon Rugg Background: Patent searching is a hard problem because of the potential cost associated with missing a relevant existing patent. With most search engines, this risk leads to a lot of false positives which need to be read. There is the further complication that most search engines provide very limited support for anyone wanting to search patents in languages that they don’t speak fluently. This article shows how Search Visualiser helps with both of these issues. This article was originally posted on March 7, 2012 In some ways, patent searching has changed dramatically over the last hundred years. In other ways, it’s still exactly the same as it was a century ago. The most obvious change is in the speed of online searching. You can find tens of thousands of potentially relevant documents in less than a second. Two key problems, though, have remained unchanged, and are so familiar that we scarcely notice them. One is that you’re limited by language: nobody searches in languages that they don’t speak. The other is that you’re limited by reading speed. Compared to the speed of the computer’s initial search, that’s glacially slow. We’ve tackled those problems by turning them on their heads. What happens if you try assessing documents for relevance without reading the words? The answer is that you can assess their relevance a lot faster, and you can do it in languages that you don’t speak. How can you do that? That’s what the Search Visualiser software is for. The key concept is simple. You can tell a lot about a document just by knowing where the keywords occur in relation to each other. Searching for prior art or existing patents is a great area for Search Visualiser because it allows researchers to start off with a general search and then narrow that search down by focusing on the website or document that shows the most promising results in terms of matching keywords by their colour and where they appear in the results.

Transcript of Searching patents with Search Visualisersearchvisualiser.com/Content/PDFs/Searching patents... ·...

Page 1: Searching patents with Search Visualisersearchvisualiser.com/Content/PDFs/Searching patents... · Searching patents with Search Visualiser By Gordon Rugg Background: Patent searching

SearchingpatentswithSearchVisualiserByGordonRuggBackground:Patentsearchingisahardproblembecauseofthepotentialcostassociatedwithmissingarelevantexistingpatent.Withmostsearchengines,thisriskleadstoalotoffalsepositiveswhichneedtoberead.Thereisthefurthercomplicationthatmostsearchenginesprovideverylimitedsupportforanyonewantingtosearchpatentsinlanguagesthattheydon’tspeakfluently.ThisarticleshowshowSearchVisualiserhelpswithbothoftheseissues.ThisarticlewasoriginallypostedonMarch7,2012

In some ways, patent searching has changed dramatically over the last hundred years. In other ways, it’s still exactly the same as it was a century ago.

The most obvious change is in the speed of online searching. You can find tens of thousands of potentially relevant documents in less than a second.

Two key problems, though, have remained unchanged, and are so familiar that we scarcely notice them. One is that you’re limited by language: nobody searches in languages that they don’t speak. The other is that you’re limited by reading speed. Compared to the speed of the computer’s initial search, that’s glacially slow.

We’ve tackled those problems by turning them on their heads. What happens if you try assessing documents for relevance without reading the words?

The answer is that you can assess their relevance a lot faster, and you can do it in languages that you don’t speak.

How can you do that? That’s what the Search Visualiser software is for.

The key concept is simple. You can tell a lot about a document just by knowing where the keywords occur in relation to each other. Searching for prior art or existing patents is a great area for Search Visualiser because it allows researchers to start off with a general search and then narrow that search down by focusing on the website or document that shows the most promising results in terms of matching keywords by their colour and where they appear in the results.

Page 2: Searching patents with Search Visualisersearchvisualiser.com/Content/PDFs/Searching patents... · Searching patents with Search Visualiser By Gordon Rugg Background: Patent searching

This is a screenshot of a Search Visualiser search for wind turbine technology patents. It shows results from a search of the web. Each website found in the search is shown as a separate column; each square within a column represents a word within that document; red squares show where the word wind occurs, green squares show where the word turbine occurs, black shows where the word technology occurs and yellow shows where the word patents occurs. It’s easy to see from this screenshot how big each record is and how relevant it’s likely to be. Also, it’s easy to do this without even knowing which language you’re seeing represented in the images; all you need to know is which colour of square represents which of your keywords so you could translate the keywords into any language and search the web for results in the language of your choice (the ‘content not readable’ result is from a secure page that requires a login to access the data).

The figure below shows the result from a search of Google patents website based on the 5th result in the example above.

Page 3: Searching patents with Search Visualisersearchvisualiser.com/Content/PDFs/Searching patents... · Searching patents with Search Visualiser By Gordon Rugg Background: Patent searching

Search Visualiser includes the ability to search an individual website for further analysis once the initial general web search has been completed. The above screenshot shows the results of a search for wind turbine technology patents on the Google patents website.

The results can be analysed further by clicking on any of the selected results above and hovering the mouse over the keyword colours in order to see a snapshot of the context in which that word appears on the website. The actual website can then be accessed by clicking on any of the white squares:

Page 4: Searching patents with Search Visualisersearchvisualiser.com/Content/PDFs/Searching patents... · Searching patents with Search Visualiser By Gordon Rugg Background: Patent searching

The figure below shows results from a search for wind turbine technology patents in French.

It is easy to identify which records are likely to be relevant, and worth getting translated. This is a considerable improvement on alternative methods, and provides a swift and efficient way of doing an initial search.

Notes

The Search Visualiser is available for online use, free, at: www.searchvisualiser.com