Search Engine for Intellectual Property Information

Intellectual property is a big deal nowadays, so it's not too surprising that there's now a search engine devoted to it. (Actually, it's more appropriately a gateway to search engines.)

IPSearchEngine ( http://www.IPSearchEngine.com ) starts off with a several screen demo. The demo doesn't drop you into the actual search engine, as you might think. Instead, you have to use the icons along the top of the screen to get into the demo. There are two sets of icons. The first set of icons are for patent prior art databases, non-patent prior art databases, request for legal fee bids (or registration in the case of attorneys), general PatentCafe resources, and registered IP attorneys and counselors. The second set of icons contains things like how to put the search engine on your own site and how to add a database to the engine.

Now, before you get to search through any of this IP goodness you'll have to register. Information required includes name, state, country, valid e-mail, number of researchers at your company, "You Are" (I wasn't any of the ones it listed and it didn't have an other), primary use, user name, and password.

Each section has a listing of several external search engines on the left side of the screen -- the patent prior art database has a listing for the USPTO, an India patents database, etc. The search form is on the IPSearchEngine page, but the results will pop-up in an external window. (I could not get this to work with the latest version of Mozilla. It works fine with Netscape 4.7, though.)

I can't say that any of the databases listed in this search engine were a big surprise to me, but IP continues to be a hot issue and I'm sure there will be more databases in the future. If a site intends to gather those database into one place and make them easy to search, that sounds good to me. Worth a look.

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