Online US Patent Number Searches

George Kovalenko

People kept asking me how to do online patent searches on the US Patent Office website, so I wrote the following set of instructions. The best way to do US patent searches is still to visit the Patent Office in Washington DC, but barring that, a Patent Depository Library is the next best thing. These depositories are located in major cities all across the US, and a list of all the locations is available at http://www.uspto.gov/, the website of the United States Patent Trademark Office. These depositories all have the full resources of the Patent Office, that is, all the subject indexes, microfilm copies of all the patents, and hard copies of all the Patent Office Gazette with abstracts of all the patents, designs, and trademarks.

There is a way of doing patent searches on the website, but there's a limitation, and it's a serious one. All the patents from the present down to 1976 are searchable online by full text in every category, but the ones from 1975 and back are NOT! You do a search, and you keep getting the message, "No patents have matched your query". It's all no, no, no! These early patents are searchable in one way only, by patent number. If you have a patent number, however, it's a snap. Here's how to navigate the website.

Above is a drawing from a Paul Wirt patent

First of all, you will need a TIFF viewer on your browser. The patents are available as very detailed, highly manipulable tagged image files, or TIFFs. They have a much higher resolution than JPEGs, but then they are also much larger files. They can take a long time to load, if you don't have a high-speed line. If you don't have a TIFF viewer, you can get a very good, free institutional viewer online in about two minutes. There is one called AlternaTIFF from Medical Informatics Engineering, Inc. You can find it quickly by searching for "alternatiff" on the google.com search engine. Just follow the instructions on the homepage, and in a few minutes you'll be ready to view the patent images. Now, here goes.

1. First of all, go to the USPTO website. You can type in the long version of the URL above, or you can search for uspto.gov simply, and your browser will still find it.

2. On the homepage, there is a column of hyperlinks on the left side. Click on "Patents".

3. On the next screen, in the left-hand column under "Issued Patents", click on "Patent Number Search". I know this sounds redundant and tedious and obvious, but once you get there, you can bookmark the page in your Favorites, so the next time you can eliminate the first three steps.

4. Next screen, click on the rectangular window under "Query", and type in the patent number, for instance, the number 174,965. Commas are not required, but it will still recognize the patent number if you type them in. Then either click on "Search", or press "Enter". I find it is faster when I press "Enter", but that perception might just be a product of my own impatience with the process.

5. Now you get a screen with what at first appears to be a very disappointing message in red type that starts, "Full text is not available for this patent", but then continues with the encouraging helpful hint, "Click on 'Images' Button above to view full patent". Well, I'll tell you, the first time I clicked on "Images" I just hit the ceiling! "Be introduced to yes!", because you then get a series of highly detailed TIFFs of the full patent.

The first images of the patent are the illustrations followed by the textual specifications, unless there aren't any illustrations. This might be the case for a patent for chemicals and compounds such as celluloid and bakelite, or for the composition of an ink. To the left of the image, there are four yellow circle-arrows for moving from image to image. You can press the inside two arrows to move one page backward or forward at a time, or you can press the two outside arrows to move quickly to the first or last image. There is also a "Specifications" link that will take you to the first page of the text.

Here's a suggestion. When you want to view the complete patent, click on the third circle-arrow until you retrieve all the pages of the patent. At that point, all the pages are cached in your browser, and you can then use the "Back" and "Forward" buttons on your browser to go quickly from page to page. Otherwise, if you continue using the yellow arrows, you will have to wait forever while each page loads. This way, you don't have to reinvent the wheel each time you want to move from page to page quickly. You can also use the "Backspace" key on your keyboard to move backward quickly through the cached images without deleting them. You can then use the "Forward" button on your browser, and the cached images will still be there.

The TIFF viewer image window has a tool bar at the top with all sorts of functions to manipulate the image. The best function of all is to simply place the mouse cursor on the image and click on it to magnify that region of the image. The detail of the image is phenomenal. There is no pixilation, or stair-stepping of diagonals, or loss of detail. To print the images, you can use the print function on your browser, but then you'll also get the framing device of the USPTO website around a small image of the patent. You can eliminate this frame by using the "Print" button in the TIFF viewer tool bar. The patent image will then fill the whole printed page.

So, you're all set to go. Now, all you need are some patent numbers. More on that later. Here are a few of my favorite patent numbers to try out in the meantime. You realize, of course, that viewing them online as you read this piece makes this an illustrated article. Have fun!

X5,581 X6,510 4,927 56,251 69,126 99,635 121,026 125,291 170,954 RE8,802 184,123 379,368 392,046 437,854 397,053 630,526 655,517 688,066 768,637 799,038 888,842 917,582 D861 D6,539 D8,382 D37,552 D38,711