Free

Sponsored by the WIPO (World Intellectual Property Organization) 

Free Registration

• additional features (e.g., PDFs)
• no advertisements

Free

Google search engine accessing
the U.S. Patents & Trademark Office

Free

Sponsored by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office

Free

Sponsored by the European Patent Office

• 1790 – current for bibliographic information
• 1863 – current for abstracts (not all are full-text searchable)

• 1836 - current
• only selected pre-1976 patents are full-text searchable

• 1790 - current
• comprehensive USPTO coverage

• 1790 - current
• pre-1976 can only search by patent # and class code

• 1836 - current 
• abstract coverage from 1970

• EPO (Europe+) 1981 -
• WIPO 1978 -
• Japanese 1976 -

• EPO (Europe+) 1981 -
• WIPO 1978 -

Excellent

• 3 search types: Simple;  Advanced (Boolean); Field combination
• full text
• 13 languages

Excellent

• proximity searching
• word weighting
• word stemming
• presents results by relevancy ranking

Excellent

• easy to search
• spelling auto-correction
• full-text search of U.S. patents from the Google Patents homepage
• Field search (e.g., patent number, inventor, filing date) using the Advanced Patents search page

Awkward

• complex syntax
• includes detailed Help menu

Good

• 5 search methods (Smart; Quick; Advanced;  Number; Class)
• onscreen syntax & search tips
• English, French & German
• links to European country specific screens

Yes

Includes PDFs of applications and other select documents

Yes

Registration required

Yes

Clicking the “Download PDF” button on the patent’s About page

No

Requires TIFF viewer for images

• Translator function for 11 languages
• Full-text searching

Registration required for advanced features such as saving searches, email alerts, viewing PDFs, etc.

• full-text searching
• able to view drawings separately
• view overview, citiations, references, claims, and drawings from the about page 

• Patent application status
• Assignee changes
• Sequence searching available