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Note: If you followed last week’s post on gaps in patent search systems, be sure to go check out the very active comments section! There were a number of great points made that we think everyone should take a look at.
At a major industry conference several years ago, Landon IP’s CEO David Hunt was investigating various patent search engines. He quickly became annoyed with the difficulty of comparing the specs of various products, as they all presented their features in very different ways. This experience was the beginning of the evolution of the Intellogist website: today, you can use the site to compare the major features of many patent search engines, and get around the frustration of dealing with vague claims about coverage and capabilities.
To use this comparison feature on Intellogist, log in to the site, navigate to http://www.intellogist.com, and click the box in the upper right corner of the page that says “Quick Table Comparisons – quickly compare patent search systems.” You will find yourself at the Quick Table Comparisons menu, where you can pick any of the listed patent search systems and press “Compare.” (We recommend picking no more than 3 or 4 at a time, simply because the table gets a bit unwieldy if you select more. )
The resulting Comparison Table shows information about each of the systems. Near the top of the table, there are a number of rows dedicated to “Ratings.” These are user-generated ratings made up of individual votes cast by registered Intellogist users. Next to each rating, the number of voting users is displayed.
Casting your own vote is simple: click on the “Rate This System” link for the system you use, and select a rating for each of the available categories. If you wish to change your rating, just refresh the page and you’ll be able to overwrite your previous vote (each user’s vote will be counted only once – trying again will just change your previous vote). If you have any trouble using the Ratings feature, please see our note below or our Ratings help page.
Did you try it? Great! Please rate the systems you currently use and let the vendors know how their products stack up. These ratings are a vehicle for the community to express their relative preferences, and move the industry’s product offerings forward.
Just a note about this feature: in order to stop spam bots from harming Intellogist and/or inflating the ratings, we require our users to authenticate their e-mail address before they can add information to Intellogist. This works very well for stopping spam, but users who forget to authenticate their e-mail addresses can run into problems using the site.
In order to Rate a system on Intellogist, and to receive other e-mail notifications from the Intellogist Team (including our regular Intellogist Scoop newsletter, which is sent to users who have accepted a “friend request” from the Intellogist Team), you must have authenticated your email address. Most Intellogist users have already done this as part of the registration process. However, if you did not perform this step when you first registered for Intellogist, you may have noticed that the Rating function doesn’t work for you.
You can authenticate your e-mail address by following these steps:
•Log in to Intellogist
•Click on the “my preferences” link in the top right corner
•On the Preferences page, click on the “User profile” tab
•Near the bottom of the User profile page, in the “E-mail” section, there is a link to “Confirm your e-mail address”
I hope everyone takes advantage of this Intellogist feature today. Questions? Let us know in the comments section!
This post was contributed by Intellogist team member Kristin Whitman. The Intellogist blog is provided for free by Intellogist’s parent company, Landon IP, a major provider of patent search and information services.
Filed under: Intellogist Updates, Patent Search Systems | Tagged: Compare search systems, David Hunt, friend request, Intellogist Scoop, Log in, Ratings, The Intellogist Team |
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