Patent Search in The Lens is easy tool offering various types of search including normal search, structured search, biological search and classification search for patents. Filtering and sorting options are available to find the most relevant and important patents which can further be used to create collections, alerts and visualizations to be annotated and shared. If users are interested in biological patents that disclose patent sequences PatSeq Finder allows to search by actual biological sequences such as DNA or protein or PatSeq text search wherein sequence species can be combined with keyword searches.
Locations
Lens Home Page
On the top left of the Lens home page is a search bar for the patent search where the search text to perform the patent search is entered.
Search Result Page
On the top of the search result page you can find the search bar where you can enter your search text to perform the patent search. Below the search text bar, you can also find a button to edit your search.
Drop down Search Menu
You can always start the new patent search by clicking on the “New Patent Search” option available on the dropdown search menu in the result list page.
Menu Bar
You can always start a new patent search by clicking on the “Patents” button available on “Our Apps” in the menu bar of every Page of the Lens.
How to Use
Search Patents
Start your search by typing a keyword in the search bar on the Lens home page or patent search page and clicking on the “Search” button. Patent Search uses the text in the search bar, even if from an existing search (filters are dropped).
Patent Structured Search
“Patent Structured Search” is effectively an assisted version of a normal search but tries to parse and modify it. The Structured Search is another way to refine your search from the very start and gives you unique options for searching for text within specific fields of each document. Structured Search tools assists you to create specific search queries, filtering by date range, classification, jurisdiction and doc type. When searching on The Lens, we query your search results against our vast database of more than 125 million patents records. Results are sorted by default using their relevance. After your initial search you can refine your parameters using the various faceted filters available to you. The query details pane displays a summary of your search, filters and results. You can remove unwanted filters here. Read more about Patent Structured Search.
Search with Query Text Editor
Patent search can be performed by typing the Boolean or keyword query typed into the search input box in the query text editor tab in patent search page. Once you start typing your Boolean query in the editor, fields will be suggested by the Lens. There is no enforced limit on the query length, however queries are URL-based, which are typically limited to ~2000 characters (browser dependent). You can use following keyboard shortcuts while searching:
- Ctrl + Space – autocomplete top suggested field
- Ctrl + Enter – Validate query
- Ctrl + Enter – Submit validated query
Apply Filters
Filters can be used in Lens to narrow down the search results or to start a search. The filter panel appears throughout the Lens on the left-hand side of the screen and can be collapsed when not in use. The filter pane shows the top faceted values for patent metadata. Explore the values available by expanding or collapsing relevant selections. Click a value to restrict your results to only documents matching that filter. Click a second time to exclude values. Each filter can be selected and then activated by hitting the “refine” button. You will then see a red box over each filter tab, showing you how many active filters, you have in that tab. You can use the “clear” button to remove filters, or simply make a new search to start again from scratch. A new search can be made at any time by clicking the down arrow next to the Refine button. All filtering options alter the number of documents included in your results. The query details pane displays a summary of filters from where you can remove unwanted filters.
Edit Search
Clicking on the “Edit Search” button below the search text bar on each patent search result page allows you to edit and refine your search to drill down into the data to get more precise result sets. In the search box you can see your current search terms. If you would like to modify these terms you can simply edit this text and hit the search button. You can also edit your search by limiting your search terms to specific sections of documents which is also a structured search. Hold CTRL/CMD to select multiple options from the auto-suggest list. Change the predicate to OR if results for all the options selected are wanted.
Sort Search
Sorting the search will change the order results are shown to you in the result list page but will not alter the number of results in the search. By default, sorting is done by relevance ranking. It is determined through advanced algorithms which establish which documents are the most relevant given your search terms, parameters and filters. Relevance is not an indicator of the document’s quality or importance, but rather is a measure of how well the document matches your search. Different sorting parameter can be changed on the results page by clicking on sort button available on the patent toolbar. The currently selected sorting parameter is shown with a blue arrow. You can sort results by the following column headings:
- Relevance
- Date Published
- Filing Date
- Earliest Priority Date
- Sequence
- Simple Family
- Cited by Other Patents
- Cites other patents
- Cites Scholarly Works
Preset Patent Searches
On the right of the New Patent Search page is a tab with presets. Here you can find the preset queries to assist you in searching when you are not sure about what to search. Clicking on any of the preset query performs a new search and launches a new search result page with the query.