In my last post, I talked about how to do the patentability search in the USPTO database. For a relatively simple patentability search, besides the USPTO database, you should always do a general internet search. Try your search on multiple search engines and always try different combination of the keywords. You can use common words search. That often generates a lot of search results that take a long time to click through. However, if you are too strict with your keywords, search results might be too limiting and narrow. Two good ways to increase the search efficiency is to use Wildcards in keyword and use Boolean logic in your search.
Wildcards in Keyword Searching
One technique often used by patent searcher to avoid the search being too narrow is to use a wild card symbol “$”at the end of a word root.
The wildcard symbol may take place of any number of additional letters that may come after that root. For example, in “cardi$,” the dollar sign replaces any other possible characters that would follow the five letters, “cardi.” Therefore, “cardi$” would scoop up the words such as cardiac, cardiology, cardiologist, etc.
You can also use wild card symbol “?” to replace any single character in a word. For example, “h??t” would return with words “heat,” “hoot,” “hilt,” “hart,” “haft,” etc.
Boolean Logic in Keyword Patent Searching
Boolean logic is a built-in function for many search engines. If you want both keywords to appear in search results, use AND as an operator. The more keywords you use with the AND operator, the smaller the number of matches you will obtain, and the more meaningful each match will be.
If you want search results to contain one of the keywords, use OR as an operator. Therefore, OR operator is used to widen the scope of the search results.
If you want to exclude keywords from your search results, use exclusive OR (XOR). XOR means that overlapping area is not included in the search results. Only one of the keywords combined with the XOR operator will appear in each of the document in your search results.
ANDNOT is a combination of the AND and NOT operators. The NOT operator, by itself, returns all the documents that do not contain the keyword behind NOT. You may use the ANDNOT operator to exclude specific keywords from the search results. In the following diagram, parentheses are used to indicate that the words within the parentheses are evaluated first. From the results generated by searching the terms inside the parentheses, any document containing the keyword C is then excluded.
Thanks for reading.
Connie
