As part of Google’s mission to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful, we’re constantly working to expand the diversity of content we make available to our users. With Google Patents, you can now search the full text of the U.S. patent corpus and find patents that interest you.
All patents available through Google Patents come from the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). Patents issued in the United States are public domain documents, and images of the entire database of U.S. patents are readily available online via the USPTO website.
Google Patents covers the entire collection of issued patents and millions of patent application made available by the USPTO, from patents issued in the 1790s through the present. We don’t currently include international patents, but we look forward to expanding our coverage in the future.
To date, the USPTO has made available approximately 8 million patents and 3 million patent applications.
Using the same technology that powers Google Book Search, Google has converted the entire image database of U.S. patents into a format that’s easy to search. You can search the full text of U.S. patents from the Google Patents homepage, or visit the Advanced Patents search page to search by criteria like patent number, inventor, and filing date.
As with Google Web Search, we rank patent results according to their relevance to a given search query. We use a number of signals to evaluate how relevant each patent is to a user’s query, and we determine our results algorithmically.
Yes, by simply clicking the “Download PDF” button on the patent’s About page. You can find this button under the patent summary section for each patent in our index.
Google and the US Patent and Trademark Office have partnered to provide bulk file downloads of patent and trademark information to everyone, for free. This information is also available on a file-by-file basis from the USPTO website, or for bulk download on CDs, DVDs, or digital tape, with fees to cover the USPTO’s expenses (often more than $10,000 and potentially up to $250,000). Many major law firms and research organizations rely on bulk file downloads so they can do more comprehensive analysis of the data. Now anyone can get the information for free by visiting http://www.google.com/googlebooks/uspto.html.
Google Patents is currently available in English, and it includes only U.S. patents. We’re always looking to extend our products and services to users worldwide, and we hope to continue to expand the patent offices we cover and the language interfaces available.
Absolutely. Our team is working hard to improve Google Patents, and we encourage you to send us any suggestions you have. Just contact us.