Google has provided users with access to the European Patent Office Patents

Google offers its users more and more useful content. Now it's available information about patents, presented at the European Patent Office. Back in 2006 the company launched a project, enabling to view patent from the United States. Now the possibilities of the project are greatly expanded.

The developers note that one of the most important problems in obtaining a patent is to confirm the novelty of the invention. In order to make sure that the invention was not patented before, researchers are forced to learn a huge amount of information from multiple sources. Thanks to the Prior Art Finder, this task is much easier. Now the information that is filed before the patent can be found in one click “Find prior art” on the page of patent. This function selects key phrases from the patent text, of which generates a search query, and then searches in patents of Google, Google Scholar, Google Books, as well as in the whole network.

In addition to the new search capabilities for European Patent Office patents, Google has updated the Translator, adding the ability to translate patents from English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and Swedish. In the future, Google plans to increase the number of languages, and, of course expand capabilities of the service.