A Conversation with the Man Behind Google Patent Search
Bill Brougher is smart and smooth, what you’d expect from a University of Washington engineer honor grad with a Harvard MBA. He cut his teeth at startups, and at Microsoft and Sun Microsystems. He joined Google in 2003, and helped launch Google Book Search, News Archive Search, and – drum roll, please – Patent Search.
Still a work in progress, Google Patent Search allows users to spelunk through more than 7 million patents using keywords. Unlike the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s Web site that requires you to navigate archaic fields, Google allows you to query by inventor name, product, claims, whatever from one search field.
Patent Search is a cousin of Google Book Search, which launched in late 2004 and had publishers up in arms over copyright issues. Google’s latest offering lacks the controversy, but like its forbearer, it’s helped democratize the Web.
Inventors Digest dialed Brougher at his Mountain View, Calif., office recently to discuss Google’s foray into making patent searches as easy as ABC.
The following is edited for clarity and length.
ID: How did Google seize on the idea of turning its book-capturing technology into the patent-search product?
BB: I was the first book-search project manager. We recognized this could be used for something other than books. Patent information was in the public domain, there was no restriction on usage, and with patents we could show the whole thing. Books you can only use 20 percent. Once we made that leap, I spent a lot of time with patent lawyers here at Google.
Patents have a lot of meta data, which is information about the patent – who the inventor is, what company is involved, information like that. And we wanted to make it very easy to search words within a patent. By running images of patent pages through our optical character recognition (OCR) process, we can extract the meta data.
ID: But how does one get 7 million patents into a word-search database?
BB: We bought more than 800 DVDs from the Patent Office. They arrived in boxes. It was no trivial task taking these DVDs, uploading the images of patent pages and getting them Web-ready. It took one or two people to do that work here at our corporate campus. I can say that from the startup, it took a couple of years. Most of that time was getting an engineer to work on it part time.
ID: What differentiates Google’s patent search from the USPTO’s?
BB: The USPTO remains the authority for patents. All the information is there. The main difference is we don’t require all the keyword and field information. Users can do simple keyword searches across all patents.
The average person hasn’t been able to conduct searches. It’s freedom to find patents. Abe Lincoln has a patent.
ID: So, what does this mean for other patent-search software and search firms?
BB: I was surprised. We heard from patent attorneys who say they love this. There’s a big difference between consumer and enterprise patents. If you’re an attorney with a patent firm, you want something that can be supported, where you can call and get information. We’re offering search. These are companies that offer more service.
ID: How’s Google going to make money off patent search?
BB: Google makes search easy. We don’t think about monetization up front. The value is the usefulness of this product. We have no plans to monetize patent search.
ID: How will Google keep its patent search current? Won’t there always be a certain latency?
BB: Very good point. The USPTO can get information up fast on their site. We get a DVD from them every week. It’s up to us to upload them on a regular basis. There will always be some latency. There will always be this snail-mail component. We could use (file transfer protocol), but we’d still have to run patents through our OCR.
ID: Your patent product is in beta now. When will it emerge from beta and what will it look like when it does?
BB: There’s a set of things that are pretty clearly important, like getting all the patents up there in a timely manner. We would like pdf downloads. Most of our traffic is outside the U.S. Over time I think you’ll see us look at other sources of patents, like from Europe and elsewhere.
