Google Extends Patent Search With European Patent Office and Prior Art Finder

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Whata really useful search tool. Find those Patents before you waste time with your new project.

Google Extends Patent Search With European Patent Office and Prior Art Finder [googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.co.uk]

At Google, we're constantly trying to make important collections of information more useful to the world. Since 2006, we’ve let people discover, search, and read United States patents online. Starting this week, you can do the same for the millions of ideas that have been submitted to the European Patent Office,

The Prior Art Finder identifies key phrases from the text of the patent, combines them into a search query, and displays relevant results from Google Patents, Google Scholar, Google Books, and the rest of the web. You’ll start to see the blue “Find prior art” button on individual patent pages starting today.

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Find those Patents before you waste time with your new project.

I'm thinking the motivation here is to possibly help in the fight against patent trolls.

Who am I kidding, they'll be using it like crazy to let their own attorneys research against suits from Apple and Microsoft. If I were Google and any Apple or Microsoft IP's hit their patent search I'd return a "403 Forbidden" just out of principle alone! ;)