Singaporean Start-up takes on Google in Patent Search

Singaporean Start-up Patsnap launched the Alpha-version of their portal last week which aims to bring patent search to a new level of simplicity and enable research to be done more easily. This puts the company in direct competition with Google’s Patent Search functionality that was launched in 2006. Google’s Patent Search, in my opinion, has been the most intuitive search engine within this arena thus far.

In its website, Patsnap mentioned that “coupled with the initial work done on the clustering technology and relevant feedbacks from the users, this search engine can be further improved for enhanced search results.” This is one of the key fundamental differences between their algorithm and Google’s as Google’s depends solely on computational methods to determine the order of search results. This is similar to how Mahalo competes with Google using semantic search.

This Alpha release seems to have only one of the 3 core functionalities that the completed site will eventually provide. The homepage hints that they will subsequently launch a social networking function and perhaps a mechanism that allow users to find all patents associated with a certain device.

After several test runs, I realized that Patsnap, even in its alpha stage, is able to equal Google Patent Searches’ capabilities and produce comparable results. In fact, I actually do prefer the layout that Patsnap provides which places the actual patent documentation on the same screen than Google which requires you to navigate to another page to see it. However, Google does have a functionality that may be more useful which shows the links of other patents that references the one you are viewing. Perhaps for the professional researcher, they may have different opinions on the quality of the search result, but for the average user like a typical college student or ad-hoc researcher, this may very well be what they are looking for.

Google Patent Search has not changed much since its launch other than perhaps its underlying search algorithm, and this makes it highly possible that the completed version of Patsnap would be able to provide a better solution than that of Google’s.

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