Search for U.S. patents on google patents but beware what you find

Official Google Blog: Now you can search for U.S. patents: "Now you can search for U.S. patents

12/13/2006 05:40:00 PM
Posted by Doug Banks, Software Engineer


"Today, we're excited to be releasing the beta version of Google Patent Search, which makes it easy to search the full text of the U.S. patent corpus and find patents that interest you. Start your exploration at www.google.com/patents or visit the Advanced Patent Search page to search by criteria, including patent number, inventor, and filing date. You can view images of original patents online."

So the first thing I do to see if this is a valuable addition to my tool box is search Xerox! 1164 patents. OK. We get more than that each year. So off to the advanced search to put Xerox as assignee. Better, I now get just over 1200!!!

BEWARE when searching this.

The same search at USPTO diectly gets

Results of Search in US Patent Collection db for:
AN/xerox: 18940 patents.
Hits 1 through 50 out of 18940

And that is a number I can believe.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/12/now-you-can-search-for-us-patents.html