PRIORsmART – nice, but not that smart attempt…
Today I came across Prior Smart meta-search engine which searches through number of patent sources – first I read about it at PIUG list and later spotted it mentioned by TechCrunch.
All in all, it’s another nice attempt to make a specialized patent meta-search engine recently I’ve also seen Patent Bar toolbar and some kind of Squidoo lens to name just a few. While Prior Smart have its merits (e.g. I was able to easily locate IT patent of an italian inventor I’ve been in touch on regard of licensing patent in Russia lately), it certainly does have it’s limitations, which have been known for ages – that be lame national PTO sites.
I tried a search on Russian patents (in fact, I wanted to locate a Russian patent granted to inventor from Italy) and spotted two issues:
1) Prior Smart submits query to RU.Espacenet server and NOT directly to RUPTO site (even despite RUPTO site been lame, it’d make sense to refer to original source, not to a mirror). More to this – RU.Espacenet server data is limited to past 1994 Russian patents only, all pre-1994 Russian (that is Soviet/USSR) patents remained out of reach.
2) Russian PTO has a funny habit of double transliteration (from Latin to Cyrillic and from Cyrillic back to Latin character set) of foreign inventors’ names which might ruin original name completely. That’s what happened in my search attempt exactly. I do not want to reveal real name I was searching on, but for example it might look like this:
Foreign applicant’s name: Inventor OH JANG-KEUN (KR)
after double transliteration –
Inventor information: OKh Dzang-keun (KR)
So, do you think I’d succeed in locating OH JANG-KEUN in Russian patents?
Hint: no, I would fail, cause OH JANG-KEUN is unknow to RUPTO, it knows only OKh Dzang-keun .
Owner of 262ventures.com blog said yesterday:
In an ideal world, making it easier to know what prior art exists across the world, should prevent, proverbially, ¦the reinvention of the wheel.· For example, there are probably tons of interesting invention buried in the Swedish patent office. But because I can·t read Swedish, I won·t even bother to look.
Same for Russian. Sadly, PriorSmart didnt succeed in making it easier by now.
PS today I updated our portfolio of most recent Russian scientific and medical articles search – this time we achieved mindblowing 2 hours turnaround, that truly deserves to be put into Guinness book of records – I wonder if they mind starting a book of patent world records 🙂
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Filed under: russian patents
