Leveraging Free Online Tools for DIY Patent Searches: A Guide for Garage InventorsOctober 10, 2024

You’ve got an invention—now what? Protecting your work may be the next step, but perhaps you’re unfamiliar with the patent system, don’t know any patent attorneys, or don’t really want to reach out for fear of incurring attorney’s fees.

Below I provide two free resources for checking to see if it is worth your time to go through the patenting process: Google Patents, and the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) patent search tool.

Google patents (found at https://patents.google.com/) provides a great resource for viewing patents, however it can give an uninformed view of whether what you’ve invented truly is novel. I will come back to Google shortly. To get a more detailed search, the USPTO’s search tool lets you narrow your search to very particular information. Although the USPTO’s search tool is what I would personally call the marriage of archaic and complication, it is not so difficult once you know what you are doing. Getting to that point is what I hope to help with now. Found at https://ppubs.uspto.gov/pubwebapp/ is the advanced search feature for U.S. patents filed at the USPTO, and it looks like this:

I will refer to these three windows as “search box” (top left), “results box” (bottom left), and “viewing box” (right).

Let’s say that your invention is a new and improved hands-free marshmallow roasting stick. To see if your invention has already been thought of by someone else we’ll use a Boolean search in the “search box”.

Rather than simply searching for “hands-free marshmallow roasting stick” in the search box (because this results in 933546 results and the top 400 “most relevant” are every pending patent that published in the most recent publication date of 2024-09-26 that include any of the words “stick”, “hands-free”, “roasting”, or “marshmallow” anywhere in the patent. Btw none of those 400 actually include the word “marshmallow”.), we instead will search for specific terms in specific parts of a patent.

A patent includes four possible sections that will return relevant information for our search: the title, the abstract, the detailed description, and the claims. As such, narrowing the search to these sections will help immensely. For example, to narrow our search we could search for all patents that include the words “marshmallow” and “stick” in any of the title, the abstract, the detailed description, or the claims. To do this, type the following exactly into the search box: (marshmallow.ti. OR marshmallow.ab. OR marshmallow.detd. OR marshmallow.dclm.) AND (stick.ti. OR stick.ab. OR stick.detd. OR stick.dclm.)

This narrows our search down to 1412 patents, and simply adding the addition of: “AND fire” at the end narrows the results down to 154 patents at the United States Patent and Trademark Office.

What are each of these odd search descriptors? “.ab.”? They can each be found in the “Help” tab of the results box, shown below.

As noted before, the relevant sections for our search query are the title, abstract, detailed description, and the claims. Why this is the case is beyond the scope of the blog, but note also that you can narrow your search to other parts of a patent such as the “assignee name” as shown in the Help tab above. In this regard, you could search for patents of a particular competitor you have by typing the name (e.g., “Marshmallow Ltd.”, note the use of quotation marks) followed by .as. which in whole looks like: “marshmallow ltd.”.as. and results in a finding of 1 patent owned by Marshmallow Ltd., U.S. Pat. No. 6,575,493 published 2003-06-10 for a collapsible trolley invention.

Jumping back to our hands-free marshmallow stick, it can be helpful to include the word “hands” in the search given that anything talking about not having to use hands will mention “hands”. This results in 695 patents (and/or publications of pending or abandoned patents). By sifting through the titles and clicking on those that are on par, this could result in giving very relevant information about other inventors who have invented things similar to a hands-free marshmallow stick. Just by way of example, typing in “AND hands-free” instead of just “hands” results in 19 patents and/or publications (shown below), and the very last one in the group is a “Combustible Fuel Burning Stove With Spark Arrestor”. This one seems relevant, so this is where I will jump back to Google. Now that we have found a potentially relevant patent, I absolutely do NOT recommend the “viewer box” of the USPTO search site. Rather, just pull the Document ID (shown below) and type it in to Google Patents (shown in the image after).

Here you will be able to view how similar/dissimilar your hands-free marshmallow stick is to this prior invention. You can click on the images (Figures) and zoom in on them, use ctrl-f to find key words, and assess from there.

By way of example, in paragraph [0073] of this patent publication it states: “Thus, once placed in this configuration, the roasting stick 1300 may be used for hands-free roasting of hot dogs, marshmallows, and other foods.”

Unless your “hands-free marshmallow stick” has more to it than just being hands-free, (e.g., yours is hands-free because it dangles from a drone hovering above the fire), then this patent reference we just found could make it difficult for you to get a patent because a patent examiner is going to look at this reference and say, “well, it’s not new to roast mallows without your hands, this reference shows that it has been done since 2019”. You would then have to come back at the patent examiner and say “no actually my way is new, I dangle my mallows from a drone above the fire and this U.S. 20210018180 reference does not do that”, and without being able to respond in this manner (showing what you’ve done that is different from the prior art), it could make getting a patent very difficult.

While the above information provides a strong starting point as to whether it is worth your time to seek a patent for your invention, the above is not all-inclusive. For example, I did not touch on public disclosures made by the inventor or others, scholarly databases involving non-patent-literature that still impact patentability, every limitation of free databases, among other things that contribute to the complex legal determination of “patentability”. As such, the above information should not be considered legal advice, and I recommend consulting with an attorney before deciding on whether to proceed with a patent application. Best of luck in your searching (and don’t forget to include the simple ideas in your search as well, like a broad Google search or typing variations of your invention into YouTube).

Connor S. Williams is a Patent Attorney in the Mechanical and Electrical Patent Practice Groups at McKee, Voorhees & Sease, PLC. For additional information please visit www.ipmvs.com or contact Connor directly via email at connor.williams@ipmvs.com.