Patent Search

A patent search is the single highest-leverage step in the patent lifecycle. Done well, it tells you — before you spend ₹1.5–3 lakh on drafting, filing and examination — whether your invention is genuinely novel, where the closest prior art sits, whether your commercial product can be sold without infringing someone else's claims, and what the competitive patent landscape looks like in your technology area. Done badly or skipped, you find out at first examination report (FER) two years later that the closest prior art was a 2014 Chinese utility model that destroys your independent claim, or you launch a product and receive a cease-and-desist from a US patent owner whose granted claim covers exactly your implementation.

By 2026, the universe of searchable prior art has exploded — over 130 million patent and utility-model documents across WIPO PATENTSCOPE, the Indian Patent Office's Inpass, USPTO, EPO Espacenet, JPO J-PlatPat, CNIPA, KIPO, plus non-patent literature in IEEE, ACM, PubMed, arXiv, and a long tail of conference proceedings. Effective searching requires multi-database query construction, classification-based searching (IPC, CPC, Locarno where relevant), citation-chain expansion, semantic similarity ranking, and human review by a patent agent or counsel with the relevant technical background. Algorithmic-only or AI-only searches miss the structural prior art that defeats applications most often.

We run four distinct search types — patentability / novelty search before filing, freedom-to-operate (FTO) search before product launch, landscape / state-of-the-art search for R&D and investment decisions, and invalidity / validity search for opposition, revocation or litigation — each delivered with a written opinion that an Indian or foreign patent agent will defend.

The Four Search Types We Run

• Patentability / Novelty Search:: Run before drafting and filing; tests whether the proposed invention is novel and inventively distinct over global prior art; output is a written patentability opinion with the closest references annotated against your claim concepts.

• Freedom-to-Operate (FTO) / Clearance Search:: Run before product launch in a target market; identifies in-force patents whose claims may be infringed by your product or process; output is a clearance opinion with risk-ranked references and design-around suggestions where infringement risk is real.

• Landscape / State-of-the-Art Search:: Run for R&D direction-setting, investment due diligence, or competitive intelligence; maps assignees, filing trends, jurisdictional coverage and white-space technology areas; output is a visual landscape report with strategic commentary.

• Invalidity / Validity Search:: Run when defending against an opposition, revocation petition, or infringement suit; identifies prior art that pre-dates the priority of the asserted patent and anticipates or renders obvious its claims; output is a validity opinion with claim-chart-style references.

Where We Search

WIPO PATENTSCOPE for global PCT and 70+ national collections; Inpass for Indian patents and applications; USPTO PatFT/AppFT and Patent Public Search for US filings; EPO Espacenet for European and 100+ country collections including machine-translated abstracts; JPO J-PlatPat, CNIPA and KIPO for Asian collections; commercial databases (Derwent, Orbit, PatSnap, Lens.org) for citation-chain and family expansion; IEEE Xplore, ACM Digital Library, PubMed, arXiv, ResearchGate for non-patent literature; competitor websites, product datasheets and conference proceedings for under-indexed disclosures.

Why a Cheap Search Is Worse Than No Search

A cheap search delivers a list of references with no claim-mapping, no Section 3 analysis, no FTO risk ranking, and no defensible written opinion. It produces false confidence — you file, get hit by an FER citing a reference your search missed, and spend the next 18 months fighting an objection that should never have arisen. Worse, in FTO it produces a false clearance — you launch, get a cease-and-desist, and now have a ₹50 lakh+ litigation exposure that ₹1 lakh of proper search would have averted. We deliver search opinions our patent agents will sign.