Use Iterative Searching to quickly find the patents you are looking for

January 29 2019 Patent searching is always an imperfect process. No matter what query we first run, we will often end up with a list of imperfect results. Professional searchers then tend to use a variety of iterations until they find what they are looking for.

Here at Ambercite we fully appreciate this, which is why we have just introduced a small but important update, the ability to hide all but newly found results, via a new “Show Only New” button, shown below:

When pressed, this will only show “New” patents, i.e. patents not previously displayed in your current session* of searching. Practically these are indicated as patents with a star next to them, for example as below:

*By current session, this refers to when you started your current patent search in Ambercite. To start a new patent search, i.e. to clear the list of patents previously displayed from Ambercite, simply refresh your browser.

How does this improve your searching?

The big benefit is is that you do not have to review patents that you have reviewed in this patent search - and there is another useful benefit as well, which will be discussed below. But lets focus on the big benefit for now.

We will demonstrate this using our much discussed patent US9,000,000, which covers the collection of rainwater by your car to use to wash its windshield. A search for similar patents to US9,000,000 will look like this:

This query return a list of results like this. In this picture, I have highlighted the terms ‘rainwater’ and ‘rain’ to make the results easier to review:

These patents (and in fact a total of 24 patents in this list of 50 search results returned by Ambercite) all appear to be relevant, so we might “Promote” these using our newly available Oromote button, shown below (To open up the Patent Review Panel, simply click on any image or abstract):

Which will add them to the query box, as shown below (promoted patents are highlighted in light blue) , and then re-run the search by pressing the “Find Similar Patents” again. The new query looks like this (only a partial list of the query patents is shown in the image below).

This query returns 100 patents as requested, being a mixture of patents previously displayed, and new results bought up by this new, wider query.

But having previously looked at the earlier results already, we are only interested in the new results, so we will press the now available “Show Only New” patents button:

Once pressed, all previously seen results will be removed, leaving only the newly found patents (and the button will turn solid blue - and if you press this button again, you will return to seeing all patents found).

And what relevant patents will we find? As in any search, we don’t expect a perfect list of results, but we do see the likes of this patent, found in 4th position on the list of newly found patents displayed:

And this patent:

And there also some other relevant patents that we found in this list. We could even take these newly found patents, add them to the query, re-run this now third search, and again look for relevant patent in the list of new patents found - all without the extra work of reviewing previously found patents.

In summary, this can be a very fast means of searching for relevant patents.

But there is another benefit from the “Show Only New” patents button, as will be discussed below.

Time lapse searching

Imagine you ran the above process, perhaps requesting 250 patents, and saved the search using our smart “Share Results” button:

And then in three months time, simply reran the saved search - not changing the query at all, but simply repeating the search process including pressing the “Find Similar Patents” button.

What would you see? Being the same query as before, you might expect a lot of the same results. But there might also be some new and relevant results that have been added to our database over this three months. Finding these new results is very simple - you simply select the “Show Only New” button, and all of the previously seen results will be filtered out, leaving you with only the new results.

So effectively, using this simple process, you can look for new results since you last ran the search - so you can easily keep an eye on changes in the patent landscape - as often as you want.

Benefits of Iterative Searching

Ambercite excels at finding relevant patents where keywords and semantic searching fails because of imprecise language, and class codes are too inconsistent. Providing you have a reasonable starting patent, you can iterate your way towards the best patents. The new “Show Only New” button makes this process easier than ever before.