SACRAMENTO – PatentCafe announced on Wednesday the launching of the industry’s first Heuristic Boolean, or “SuperBoolean” patent search engine for patent attorneys, professional patent searchers, engineering managers and intellectual property managers.
According to a press release by the company, the extremely powerful Heuristic Boolean engine relevancy ranks patent search results using a Latent Semantic Analysis database as its expert system. The most significant patent search advancement since the introduction of the IBM Patent Server in 1997, PatentCafe’s SuperBoolean engine helps patent professionals discover more prior art faster, resulting in higher quality patent applications, and faster patent issuances.
In July, the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) announced a new proposed rule change intended to encourage patent applicants to provide the USPTO with the most relevant prior art patents related to their inventions. It said that some applicants send a very large number of documents with their applications, tending to obscure the most relevant information. Applicants submitting only the most relevant prior art citations will see their applications get processes more quickly.
PatentCafe’s CEO Andy Gibbs noted that, “the early-adopter Fortune 500 companies and government agencies have found that our SuperBoolean search engine uncovers highly relevant patents that traditional search engines miss. In two recent cases, more than 25 relevant patents were found that traditional commercial patent search engines failed to discover.”
PatentCafe’s SuperBoolean engine allows researchers to search with fewer keywords, and see the most relevant patents at the top of the search results list. Not only is the process significantly faster than the old iterative Boolean process, it helps ensure that the fewest relevant patents are missed. The time-saving benefit was estimated by one Beta site to be more than $17,000 annually for each full time researcher.
More importantly, finding the most relevant prior art before filing new patent applications also helps mitigate the risks of the runaway costs of future patent infringement, such as the $480 million award to Paragon Trade Brands by Weyerhaeuser Co., the $465 million award to Lexar by Toshiba, or the now infamous $521 verdict in Eolas verses Microsoft.
The PatentCafe brand is recognized worldwide as one of the Web’s largest and most innovative intellectual property resources of international patent data and intellectual property management solutions.
