United States Patent and Trademark Office Bulk Downloads

That Google. They have a lot of stuff, including some US Patent and Trademark office material.

The following USPTO patent products are available for free download.

Grant images
Grant full text
Grant bibliographic data
Published applications
Assignments
Maintenance fee events
USPTO Red Book
Classification information

Google must have been delivering patents for some time through its Patents beta site since their database contains “over 7 million patents”. I don’t recall hearing about this and would have remained ignorant but for Alex Horns post about the bulk data news from Tech Daily Dose.

As the Google folks say about their patents search: “As part of Google’s mission to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful, we’re constantly working to expand the diversity of content we make available to our users. With Google Patent Search, you can now search the full text of the U.S. patent corpus and find patents that interest you.”

While it is mildly interesting to me personally that USPTO material is searchable through Google, what is more personally relevant is that I didn’t know about it. That sounds arrogant, but it is my job to know about sources of legal information…including patents.

The existence of Google Patents is not revealed by clicking the “more” drop down at the top left of the Google start page. It isn’t listed in their Search Features page, nor is it one of the nearly 70 experimental items in Google Labs. The Wikipedia page explaining Patents does not mention Google searching (maybe tomorrow it will) and the USPTO has their own search engine. Unless I am missing something, the only way to identify that Google has a patent search function – unless you read this post – is to carefully read the hit list when you search the word “patents” in Google…It was hit 3 on Google.com, and hit 1 on my iGoogle start page (even though I live in Canada and Canadian patents are still best searched vi a the Canadian Patents Database from Industry Canada).

Did I miss some big announcement?