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Patent searching on the Internet is a hot topic in the information world these days, even though the resources to do it have been very sparse. Free databases are limited in time coverage, subject range, searchability, and which information can be displayed. Internet advocates have been pushing the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) to mount the ASCII text portion of the APS (Automated Patent Search) system and make it accessible for free. The PTO has said this would be prohibitively expensive and has compromised with a free database of front-page information. (This appeared last year amid much controversy [1].)
Internet patent search resources took a big step forward with the introduction of QPAT-US, Questel Orbit's new database of full-text U.S. patents, 1974 to present. While this 110GB database is not free, subscriptions are priced competitively: unlimited use for $1995/year for the first license (password), lower prices for second and subsequent licenses, and a half-price first license for nonprofit and academic organizations. Multiple users may access any one license as long as they're not doing so at the same time.
Some freebies are also available. will Of interest to users of the PTO Internet database: Questel Orbit has mounted a free database of front-page patent information with all the QPAT US search features. And, Questel Orbit has offered QPAT US free to the 80 Patent and Trademark Depository Libraries in the U.S.
QPAT US is designed to be all things to all users. Novices and end-users can go to the Main Search page, throw in a naturallanguage query, and happily browse through patent titles that the search produced, 50 at a time. Experienced patent searchers can take advantage of some fairly sophisticated search and display capabilities.
RELEVANCE RANKING
All the searches you do on QPAT US will give you results in relevance-ranked order. The relevance-ranking engine, based on one developed several years ago by Personal Library Software, as integrated for Questele Orbit by Electronic Press, looks at how many times a search term appears in a patent and weighs this against how common the term is in the database and the length of the patent compared to others in the database. If you're searching multiple terms, how many of them show up in a patent...