USPTO Launches Inventor Search Assistant Beta

The USPTO has launched a patent searching site for individual inventors using a machine learning system.

Trying an example by pasting the abstract of a US patent into the system it was gratifying that the source document was the first reference retrieved.

Instructions for using the system from the site is provided below:

You cannot get a patent if your invention has already been publicly disclosed. Therefore, a search of all previous public disclosures, foreign patents and printed publications should be conducted. This tool was designed to help you get started. More information about patent searching can be found here.  

1. Start by searching for either descriptive text or keywords of your invention, or search by an known USPTO application ID.
2. View the relevant documents and figures in the search results
3. While viewing results, select each document of interest to save
4. Click the Display Saved Results button to view all saved documents and export or print

The searchable documents in this release contain all the pre-grant U.S. utility patent publications from 1/1/2001 to 4/30/2020. The Utility figures/drawings search is based on the same collection. No searchable non-US patent applications or Non Patent Literature (NPL) are available in this release. More documents will be added into the collection into future release.

You can try the system at the link below.