What is a patent search?

A very broad description might be that a patent search is the process by which prior inventions or ideas are examined, with the goal being to find information that bears close similarity to a given patent or proposed invention.

If that description is not very enlightening, don't worry - it is necessarily vague because there are many different kinds of patent searches, and it is hard to capture the essence of each type in a single description. Detailed descriptions of each type of search will be presented later.

The documents searched during a patent search may include U.S. and foreign patents, published patent applications, and non-patent literature, such as the Web, product literature, and scientific journals and databases.