Law Office of Alicia Porter

Allright, I admit it…. I am a Quick Search junkie on the USPTO web site. It’s not that I have this overwhelming desire to spend extra hours going through patent by patent, or that I have this sick and twisted desire to use Boolean search phrases such as “andnot” or to count characters( after all, one cannot have more than 1475 characters in each search – I know from personal experience).

But I like Quick Search, as it’s the closest I am ever going to personally get to something like “Deal or No Deal”. It’s fun to tweak with the phrasing a little bit, to see if you can eliminate more of the numbers in the search to make it more reasonable. For example, add two terms and exclude two terms, and your generic search went from 1400 hits to 250 hits. But it’s also kind of fun to see what other words get brought up during Quick Search, and then wondering “hey, can my client’s idea be used in that way? Perhaps I should check out the application”. What can I say, other than it’s a fun little tool to help figure out which classifications are really the place to focus my search?

And who knows, I might get lucky, with the right buzz words and narrow my search to 10 patents or less…