Unified’s Portal Introduces Full-Text Patent Search

Unified’s Portal has recently expanded its capabilities to include full-text search of English patents. The full-text search takes advantage of Apache Lucene and allows for a number of Boolean operators to help expand or narrow a given search. These Booleans are common among most search engines and will help users to quickly find relevant search results without learning a new syntax. For example, a Boolean search could be "Apple" AND "Bluetooth". This would limit the search results to only those documents containing the two keywords.

Summary

The following list is provides a quick reference of how to conduct Boolean search operations in Unified's Portal platform:

To put this into practice, say a searcher was wanting to look at the relevant patents that cite IEEE 802.11ax or the Wi-Fi 6 standard. A user would click the “Search In” button. 

From there the User would then select Non Patent Citations. Users can also filter through a number of fields in the patent including full-text, but also limit the search to Description, Claims, Abstract, Title and Non Patent Citations.

Example: IEEE 802.11ax (Combining)

When the User selects this criteria, a total of 408 patents are found. Keep in mind that this format is looking for the words IEEE and 802.11ax as separate words. If the user wants the exact phrase, then the user simply uses quotation marks, such as ‘IEEE'+ '802.11ax^4'. The "+" or required operator requires that the term after the "+" symbol exist somewhere in the field of a single document. To boost a term use the caret, "^", symbol with a boost factor (a number) at the end of the term you are searching. The higher the boost factor, the more relevant the term will be. Boosting allows you to control the relevance of a document by boosting its term. By default, the boost factor is 1. Although the boost factor must be positive, it can be less than 1 (e.g. 0.2). By adding those two booleans the search results narrow to 197 patents. 

Example: IEEE 802.11ax and OFDMA (Boosting)

Now, let's say a search was needed to see if the cites not only cited IEEE 802.11ax but also OFDMA. The user would use the + sign, like ‘IEEE 802.11ax^4' + 'OFDMA' and would result in 93 patents. In addition, if the user wanted to not include patents that contained Medium Access Control or MAC, then the user would type ('IEEE 802.11ax^4' + "OFDMA') NOT ('Medium Access Control' or 'MAC). This would allow the search to find everything that contains 802.11ax and OFDMA but exclude the Medium Access Control. This would result in 11 patents. 

Example: Physical Layer (Fuzzy Search)

Now turning to the claims, if a user were to limit the search just to claims and look for patents related to the Physical Layer, the user could use "Physical Layer"~. This makes sure that the phrase Physical Layer is found together but also uses a fuzzy search. Portal supports fuzzy searches based on the Levenshtein Distance, or Edit Distance algorithm. To do a fuzzy search use the tilde, "~", symbol at the end of a Single word Term. This resulted in over 9,000 patents being found. 

If the user wanted to narrow the search to user equipment and place greater emphasis on the user equipment, the syntax would be "Physical Layer"~ + "user equipment"^4. This would result in 1,121 patents. If the inverse wanted to be found, then the user could use "Physical Layer"~ NOT "user equipment"^4 which results in 429 patents. Note, that if a full-text search is done using the same syntax, then it results in over 10,000 patents. 

Being able to do the fuzzy searches, also allows the user to tune it. The value is between 0 and 1, with a value closer to 1 only terms with a higher similarity will be matched. The default on fuzzy searching is typically set to 0.5. For instance, using "Physical Layer"~0.7+ "user equipment"^4 results in 1,050 patents. 

Example: Physical Layer (Proximity Search)

Now, let's say the user wanted to find the User Equipment 5 words away from the Physical Layer, the input would be "Physical Layer"~5+"user equipment"^4. This would result in  2,499 patents. 

Boasting, Fuzzy Searches, and Proximity Searches allow users to strategically craft a search that will create relevant search results. This could be expanded to look for a specific claim and elements within that claim. If the search criteria was to look for a method claim that delivers a signal, a search could be done, like "method delivering"~4+"signal". This search is looking to find delivering and method within four words of each and also signal in the claim language. This specific search results in 1,601 patents. Both these operators can help reduce the noise of searching and find relevant information. 

Conclusion

By using Boolean searching that enables users to combine keywords with operators (or modifiers) allows users the ability to do full-text searches in Portal that are relevant to their specific case. For more information about searching or using filters in the Portal, see our other FAQs or submit a question.