Google Patent Search

More good news from Google. A few weeks ago the company created a text index of over 7,000,000 US patents. The new search is called Google Patent Search, and it is a very slick resource.

The current version covers patents issued in the 1790s through those issued in the middle of 2006. Future versions will include patent applications, international patents, or U.S. patents issued over the last few months. As always, Google provides a simple and great UI--even serving up images (PNGs for now and hopefully PDF in the future).

This is a great search engine and sure makes it easy to look for patents. Try it out and enjoy--and bonus points for you if you can find the patent applications I worked on!