Searching for U.S. Patents on the Internet

The website of the U.S. Patent and Trademarks Office offers all the tools necessary to do a comprehensive search for previously issued U.S. patents, from 1790-present. The website contains a database of the text and drawings for all issued patents. 

Please review the following limitations of patent searching on the Internet before proceeding with the step-by-step instructions:  

• A patent search is not an easy task to do.
  If you are an inventor who will make decisions based on the results of a patent search, it is important to consider whether you want to attempt to do a patent search yourself. A thorough search could take many hours. You may want to consider hiring a patent attorney or a patent search firm. To perform a prior art search, the following research tools should be investigated: 

  • U.S. and foreign patent databases. See the Patents and Trademarks Research Guide, Fogler Library. Also see the guide to Searching for U.S. Patent on the Internet.

  • Databases that contain journal articles and technical or government reports for the relevant subject area. You will want to utilize databases on the list of databases available statewide in Maine. These databases are made available by the Maine State Library and the Maine State Legislature. Also see Maine's Science, Technology and Business Portal for information on a wide variety of internet resources.

  • The Internet: You will need to utilize a variety of search engines.

  • Company and product catalogs. See especially:

• Building Materials by McGraw-Hill Sweet's. Construction industry marketplace that lists close to 60,000 products.
• Hoover's Online.The business information authority.
• ManufacuringNet. The manufacturing marketplace.
• Thomas Register. Lists over 173,000 U.S. and Canadian manufacturers.
• Thomas Global Register of Europe.
• Yahoo Business directories and yellow pages.