New full-text searching option in Espacenet
Full text can now be searched at Espacenet, an enormous step forward. It went live on 15 March 2016, and it is a powerful new feature that gives patent searchers new ways of improving their search results even more.
The full-text search interfaceincludes most of the options available in the advanced search option Espacenet, so it will be familiar to regular users of the online platform, but adding a new Keyword field near the “Title” and “Title or abstract” fields. You can enter keywords in your chosen language here.
Why search in full text?
A “perfect search” will retrieve all the relevant documents, and no irrelevant documents. What full-text searching does, is to increase your chances of retrieving a high number of relevant documents. The downside is that you sometimes also increase the number of irrelevant documents in your result list. For important searches, this is a price that is well worth paying as the tool will greatly facilitate the task of patent search based on certain keywords, which is certainly a breakthrough.
Need to know more?
Check out announcements on the EPO website and the Espacenet landing page for forthcoming webinars giving you a full demonstration of the new full text search in Espacenet. Stay tuned!
Source: EPO