Patents

Problems

Last Updated (Tuesday, 18 November 2008 16:23)

2) Problems associated with conventional patent searching technologies

Challenges of patent searching

Search can be broadly broken into two categories. Discovery and recovery. Discovery involves finding information that you are unaware is there, whereas recovery is finding information that you already know is there. Recovery is what conventional search does reasonably well. Conversely, conventional search is terrible at discovery. If you don’t know a piece of information is there, how can you think of the terms to use in order to find it?

Searching in Patent data is almost entirely about discovering information you don’t know about rather than recovering information you do know about. What is very surprising is that this current patent search engines use conventional Boolean search for patent searching.

When using a Boolean search process you specify a number of terms (lets say 5) you think are relevant and the system returns documents containing these terms. But what if there is a patent with only 4 of these terms – is this not relevant also? Yes it is but which 4? All combinations of 4 terms could be relevant so you try all possibilities. But what about 3 of the terms? So now you try all combinations of 3 terms also…… and 2 terms...

In order to do this requires 25-1 unique combinations of terms which is quite a challenge both cerebrally and in terms of time.

As if this wasn’t bad enough there is the additional problem that one or more of the terms used by you may have an alternative or equivalent (synonymous) term that was actually used by the patent author (eg Car / Automobile). You then have to repeat the search with this synonymous term involving a repeat of the searches you carried out originally.

Then there is the problem that an attorney may have deliberately invented a term to disguise or hide a patent from you when searching for it – how can you overcome that?

What about the fact that so many patents have been scanned from their original source and have words or entire sentences or paragraphs missing? If the part containing your search term isn’t there you can’t find it!

It is little wonder this seems an impossible task sometimes.