Google Chrome Highlighting Solution: Find Many Strings

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Here at the Intellogist Blog, we are continually intrigued by the pursuit of the best possible prior art searching setup. Part of this setup is determining the best tools to help one’s self accomplish your goal of finding the best prior art, something our parent company Landon IP takes very seriously when doing searches for our clients.

Part of this is finding the best browser for patent searching. A continuation of that pursuit is modifying said browser. Among other options, users can modify their browsers with toolbars (including toolbars for IP professionals) or seek other add-ons or extensions.

One of the most dramatic ways to improve a prior art searcher’s experience is to incorporate keyword highlighting. From the very beginning, we’ve touted highlighting as a way to improve search and found a way to implement more highlighting options. Unfortunately, the add-on highlighted in the previously linked post, Google Toolbar, is no longer supported in the newer versions of Firefox. Additionally, the highlighting within Google Chrome only supports one highlighted keyword at a time.

So, what’s a prior art searcher to do? Find a solution, that’s what! Today I’ll profile a Google Chrome Extension called “Find Many Strings.” This tool presents yet another option in the ever expanding array of search environment personalizations.

Find Many Strings (FMS) is a Google Chrome Extension created by Sankar P. Here’s the description straight from Sankar:

“Find Many Strings” lets you search and highlight multiple words in a webpage. The difference between the browser’s in-built Find feature and FMS is that, for every word you search, the word is highlighted in a different color and the highlights of the old searches don’t disappear.

Additionally, FMS is open source, no data is stored, and words can autofill into the keyword entry box by highlighting text prior to calling up the extension.

Once installed, users can access FMS by clicking on the FMS logo in the upper right corner of the Chrome browser. A keyword box appears for users to enter desired text, along with buttons to add that text to the collected highlighting and another button to clear all current highlighting.

FMS is capable of generating many many colors, as you can see in the example below:

As many colors are possible, complicated highlighting schemes are possible.

Entered keywords are found within words, with no way to specify whether or not the user wants this to occur. This might be preferable to pick up related words (in the example above “fixation” is highlighted within “affixation”), but it would be nice to allow users to control whether or not this behavior was enabled.

This gets to the utility of FMS: it’s great as an additional highlighting add-on for Chrome, but not a substitute for an advanced highlighting module specifically designed for prior art searchers, one example of which is the highlighting system included in PatBase.

What are your favorite highlighting or browser add-on solutions? Let us know in the comments below. We’ll be profiling more in the future, so stay tuned!

This post was contributed by Intellogist Team member Chris Jagalla. The Intellogist blog is provided for free by Intellogist’s parent company Landon IP, a major provider of patent searches, trademark searches, technical translations, and information retrieval services.