New to patent searching? Here’s what you need to know.

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It’s true – I was once new to patent searching, blithely dumping keywords into Google and saying things like  “IPC code? What’s that?”  Ah, youth.   Fortunately, before turning me loose on the unsuspecting public, some extremely patient search experts worked with me on the major concepts of patent information.

And what is the biggest challenge for a new patent searcher?  In my view, it’s understanding the legal concepts behind the organization of patent information. Let me go through just a few of these ideas on a very basic level.  By the way, I am not a lawyer and none of this post constitutes legal advice.

Date online materials using the Internet Archive

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We all know that the legal element of patent searching can add an interesting twist onto scientific and technical literature searches.   Those of us in the Intellogist community who do lots of validity investigations, for example, know that it’s not only *if* material is publicly available, but *when* it was publicly available, that counts.   Lots of folks I have talked to recommend the Wayback Machine, a.k.a. the  Internet Archive or archive.org, to provide useful evidence that web content was available online before a certain date.