Google Patent is a new Google tool, facilitating the search of the full text of US patents using Optical Character Recognition and resulting in a good response time. This tool covers a full-text index of all US patents up to the middle of 2006, i.e. over 7 million patents.
The full-text searching of the US Patent and Trademark Office only covers patents going back to 1976 and for earlier patent search metadata are required. However, unlike the esp@cenet search engine, the Google Patent Search includes only granted patents and not US patent applications.
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