Have you used Google’s Patent Search?
I was wondering whether some companies, especially those without a significant amount of venture capital or any other source of capital and are initially unable to afford lawyers or paid services to access the database of patents should use Google’s Patent Search for research into whether whatever they are doing has been patented and what are the relevant patents.
Asking this because who knows what goes on behind the scenes with the logging of search queries. Won’t the queries for patent search be a rich source of information on what people are currently working on or going to work on.
Of course, people might argue that people at Google are probably intelligent enough to have their own ideas and they won’t need to use the logs for inspiration or whatever juice it might give them. But competitive people like any advantage they can get and if I know what you are looking for but you don’t know what I’m thinking, obviously one person has an advantage. Correct?
What if some Google employee is spending that famous 20% of his time doing a pet project and stumbles at a road block. What if some other guy is working on a similar problem. What if he found a solution, one that seems so obvious to him that he wonders if someone might have already done it and patented it. What if he searches for it using the patent search engine provided by Google. What if that Google employee has access to the logs and analyzes the queries made that might be related to that project. And sees the query made by the other guy. What if….
A lot of ‘What ifs’. None of it might ever happen. But what if it does.
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