We all know that patent and non-patent literature are powerful sources of data that can lead to your company’s next big idea. However, uncovering the insights that move your business forward takes the right patent search techniques. IP.com’s customer success team shares four little-known search strategies for getting the most out of your patent search tool.
How To Find Highly Relevant Search Results
With hundreds of thousands of patents granted every year in the US alone, finding the most relevant patent data is not always easy. However, highly relevant patents are likely what you’re looking for. IP.com uses a proprietary, AI-backed relevancy score to rate each search result’s usefulness as it relates to your query. Then you can filter your search results to include only those with a four- or five-star relevancy rating.
The best search queries are between six and 12 words long, which gives our AI engine a good idea of what you’re looking for. The AI that powers InnovationQ Plus® and our relevancy score is trained specifically on language as it relates to patent data, giving you confidence in the results of your search. Visualizing the results using a semantic map or term heat map can help you find even more relevant results.
How To Incorporate Patent Searching into Ideation
Traditionally, patent searching was left to IP professionals and legal teams later in the innovation lifecycle. Now, engineers and scientists are looking at prior art early in the patent process to narrow their focus and ensure their ideas are novel. At this point, you’re using fewer filters to cast a wider net across patent and non-patent literature. It may be helpful to add concept modifiers to increase or decrease the importance of specific keywords or phrases within your query without limiting the results too much. Interactive visualizations, which can be customized, are a powerful tool for understanding how new technologies may fit into the landscape.
InnovationQ Plus allows users to save their searches, including specific portfolios, filters, term lists, and notes. This gives searchers the ability to return to their research throughout the innovation lifecycle, narrowing it further as an invention takes shape.
How To Get an In Depth Look at the Patent Landscape
When you’re ready for a closer look at the patent landscape, detail-oriented patent search techniques can help you dive deeper into a specific technology. Not only should your search queries be more specific at this point, but you can enter an entire invention disclosure into the search field. This gives the AI engine a lot of concepts to look for and base relevancy on. Filters can be used to eliminate unhelpful results. Then, utilize visualization features within your patent search tool to compare portfolios of patents in your area of interest.
How To Combine AI with Traditional Search Methods
Syntax searching traditionally means your search results are based on the exact words and phrases you enter, as well as any Boolean operators you include to narrow or expand your search. Our AI engine enables “smart stemming,” which expands on syntax searches.
AI-backed search uses the concept described in your queries to find relevant results that may not use exactly the same words and phrases to describe a similar technology. With concept searching, you’re able to expand your search and knowledge of a technology landscape, perhaps even identifying new competitors within a space you would not have known to search for and therefore would not have found with syntax searching alone. The reverse is also a powerful patent search strategy: you can use the AI engine to identify which concepts appear most frequently in your competitors’ patents and use those concepts to find relevant patent data.