- published: 19 Mar 2014
- views: 5202
Google Patents is a search engine from Google that indexes patents and patent applications from the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), which are taken from the original USPTO database (which is in the public domain). All 8 million patents have been put in the database. Optical character recognition (OCR) has been performed on the pages to make them searchable. This searchability includes all US patents and published patent applications.
The service was launched on December 14, 2006. Google says it uses "the same technology as that underlying Google Books", allowing scrolling through pages, and zooming in on areas. The images are saveable as PNG files.
The indexing is not perfect. Reportedly, as of December 14, 2006,[dated info] not all IBM patents were locatable, as searching for IBM patents retrieved only 1,197 results on Google Patents, but that IBM received nearly 3,000 patents in 2005 alone.
In terms of response time, the performance of Google Patents is considered to be very good.
Steven Paul "Steve" Jobs (/ˈdʒɒbz/; February 24, 1955 – October 5, 2011) was an American businessman, designer and inventor. He is best known as the co-founder, chairman, and chief executive officer of Apple Inc. Through Apple, he was widely recognized as a charismatic pioneer of the personal computer revolution and for his influential career in the computer and consumer electronics fields. Jobs also co-founded and served as chief executive of Pixar Animation Studios; he became a member of the board of directors of The Walt Disney Company in 2006, when Disney acquired Pixar.
In the late 1970s, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak engineered one of the first commercially successful lines of personal computers, the Apple II series. Jobs was among the first to see the commercial potential of Xerox PARC's mouse-driven graphical user interface, which led to the creation of the Apple Lisa and, one year later, the Macintosh. During this period he also led efforts that would begin the desktop publishing revolution, notably through the introduction of the LaserWriter and the associated PageMaker software.