Help

No. It finds published documents that may be relevant to your invention. Whether any of them defeats it is a judgement about novelty and obviousness, and that judgement is a patent attorney's to make. The value here is finding the prior art, not ruling on it.

Published patents and patent applications. Every reference is checked against the European Patent Office's register and Google Patents before it reaches your report. It does not cover journal articles, product manuals, conference papers or anything unpublished — so a quiet result is not proof that nothing exists.

A primary reference bears directly on the invention as a whole. A secondary one relates to a particular component, function or related implementation, or bears on the invention less directly.

The models behind the search are not deterministic, so a second run can surface references the first did not, and can describe the same invention in different words. Neither run is wrong. If a reference appears once and not again, it is still worth reading.

It describes how much the search had to work with, not how good the invention is. A thin disclosure produces a broader, vaguer search; adding detail narrows it. A strong invention can be described thinly and a weak one described at length.

Each question is one where an answer would let the search look for something specific rather than something general. They are optional. Answering them and running again costs a reading.

Tell us using the form on this page. If a reference is marked as reported, not confirmed, no register we checked holds that number — treat it with suspicion. Everything else has been confirmed to exist, though whether it is relevant is a separate question.

Your disclosure and any figures are stored so the report can be produced and read again. You can delete a report and everything belonging to it at any time from Your Data, and you can set reports to be deleted automatically after a period you choose.

Up to five working days.