Google is well known for its search engine, the product that started it all, but some of its search features and specialized search engines are less known. One though is about to get a lot more exposure, Google Patent Search is now being integrated in the sidebar.For some users, it hasn't been rolled out to everyone yet or Google may still be testing the feature, certain queries will now return a specialized search filter dubbed Patents, which you can pretty much guess what it does.
The filter is otherwise buried after the "More" link in the sidebar which reveals all of the specialized search options available. Google has been working on getting more search verticals integrated and Patents is below the recently added Recipes.
If you don't see the new section, you can add &tbm=pts to the end of your search URL.
Google has had a dedicated patent search engine, appropriately dubbed Google Patents, for five years enabling users to sift through seven million such patents, the site boasts.
Anyone interested in a particular patent, or trying to settle a curiosity, can visit google.com/patents and search through the database. Few people find themselves looking for patent papers on a regular basis and even fewer knew the tool existed.
Typical for Google, the dedicated search engine is still in beta, five years after launch.
But that's about to change as users will be a lot more likely to stumble upon the patent repository if they see dedicated search results and the new section on the main site.
As for why Google choose this particular time to roll out the new feature, it's anyone's guess. There's certainly a lot of legal activity surrounding patents these days, much of it involving Google, particularly relating to Android.
The company has also made a bid to acquire some 6,000 patents for as much as $900 million and also a smaller bid for another portfolio. [via Google OS]
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