Improving Google Patents with European Patent Office patents and the Prior Art Finder by Jon Orwant, Engineering Manager (Google Research).
From the post:
At Google, we’re constantly trying to make important collections of information more useful to the world. Since 2006, we’ve let people discover, search, and read United States patents online. Starting this week, you can do the same for the millions of ideas that have been submitted to the European Patent Office, such as this one.
Typically, patents are granted only if an invention is new and not obvious. To explain why an invention is new, inventors will usually cite prior art such as earlier patent applications or journal articles. Determining the novelty of a patent can be difficult, requiring a laborious search through many sources, and so we’ve built a Prior Art Finder to make this process easier. With a single click, it searches multiple sources for related content that existed at the time the patent was filed.
Maybe the USPTO will add:
Have you used Google’s Prior Art Finder? as part of the patent examination form.
Vocabulary issue remains but at least this is a start in the right direction.