Google Patents

There are many tools useful to make a patent search. One such simple tool is Google Patents. Google Patents offers many advantages: easy to use, free, includes powerful search capabilities. It is notably possible to conduct a patent search by using keywords amongst the earliest American patents, which is not possible on the American Patent Office web site.

Google Patents offers an optical character recognition tool that searches older digitized patent documents. This is particularly useful for relatively simple inventions of the mechanical type.