I noted that the abstract & title of several documents published in German
appeared in English, even for a document less than 8 weeks old. Is the
EPO providing the translated titles/abstracts for non-English documents?
One possible bug I noted was that the "Add to Price Quote" checkbox on the
frontpage screen seemed not to work for adding that document to an order,
whereas the checkbox worked fine from the patent number/titles screen.
One last comment. Will the search result maximum be raised above 500,
which appears to be the maximum, at least during beta? Also, how is date
ranging done if you need to narrow a search to under 500 to permit viewing?
Numeric range operators, e.g., > < didn't seem to work, nor did the
"19850101 to 19971001" syntax, at least in my searches yesterday. If you
will limit results to <500 before answers can be viewed, you must insure
some easy means of chronological or document type narrowing, e.g., EP in
one group, WO in another. Will this system be including EP-B documents
eventually?
roy.zimmermann@medtronic.com
Patent Information Specialist
612-514-3304 FAX: 612-514-3233
>>> Judy Hickey <jhickey@micropat.com> 12/04/97 05:16pm >>>
Thanks to Sandra*s watchful eye, you may already have read about the
beta launch of World PatentSearch. We hope to use the beta version to
collect comments from the patent community as well as to give us time to
add data and features before the official launch in early 1998.
The database covers both EP and PCT published applications from 1978 to
September 18, 1997 for PCT and to October 29 for EP. Very soon, we will
be updating the database weekly on a regular schedule. As soon as the
weekly update procedures are in place, we will announce the update
schedule, which we expect will be within a few days of publication for
both EP and PCT records.
We are also working on adding the remaining drawings (currently only
1997 drawings are in place) and clarifying the EuroPCT connections, both
in the World PatentSearch database and in the document ordering process.
For information about field-level search content and format, click on
the field names on the *Fielded Search* form. Information about the
latest update is also provided at the top of this form.
We have tried to make the registration process as seamless as possible,
and there is no cost involved in registering, so if you are not already
a MicroPatent PatentWeb user, we invite you to become one today. The
World PatentSearch Beta is also completely free. Should you find some
documents of interest, the option for ordering one or more directly for
immediate download is available. The PatentWeb is at
http://www.micropat.com .
-- MicroPatent LLC 203 466-5055 http://www.micropat.com