Patent It Yourself - PDF Archive

ChaPter 6 | SEARCH and you may FIND | 165
Fig. 6W—PTO Quick Text Search Page
Fig. 6X—PTO Quick Text Search Results Page
Fig. 6Y—PTO Advanced Search Page
Fig. 6Z—PTO Advanced Search Results (Page 1)
that looks interesting, click its title or number. Again, the
same procedure can be used to search patent applications
(use the information on the right-hand side of Fig. 6P).
Also note that in addition to the AND Boolean operator,
the operators OR and ANDNOT are available. Further,
nested expressions, such as tennis AND (racquet OR racket)
are available. If you enter this query, you will retrieve a
list of all patents that contain both the terms tennis and
either racket or racquet somewhere in the document. For
another example, consider the search terms television
OR (cathode AND tube). This query would return patents
containing either the word television OR both the words
cathode AND tube. A third example is the search expression
needle ANDNOT ((record AND player) OR sewing). This
complex query will generate a list of hits that contain the
word needle, but not contain any references to sewing. In
addition, none of the hits would contain the combination of
record AND player.
c. PTO Advanced Search
Despite its name, the “Advanced Search” page (see Fig. 6Y)
really doesn’t offer any more capabilities than the “Quick
Search” page. The “Advanced Search” page is simply more
difficult to use since it requires that you enter the search
query in free form. The field must be manually typed (see
Fig. 6Y). Note that the field codes must be typed before
the search terms. Fig. 6Z shows part of the results of the
advanced search of Fig. 6Y.