PatentMonkey Launches as Patent Search and Review Site

PatentMonkey went live on February 1, 2007.  The founders provide some background about their service at the Infinite Monkey Theorem blog:

Our catalyst for building a great patent search site comes from our team's work with the USPTO, our direct experience on a number of projects and in hearing from many users the frustrations with current search options. While the PTO is a great primary resource, they have not focused as much on user interface needs. Pretty much everyone agrees on this and few other companies have comprehensively picked up the slack. As Paul Graham says, "I don't know why it's so hard to make something people want. It seems like it should be straightforward. But you can tell it must be hard by how few startups do it."

While reviewing the landscape of patent searching and download sites (we estimate that there are over 30 of them), we found a big gap of sites that offer BOTH a great user interface for searching all the available PTO fields and the ability to access PDF documents starting with free, open access. After months of work, we more fully appreciate the reasons why there are so few that do it all.

Moreover, we also found that there are a large number of people that do patent searches that don't subscribe to a top-tier service because of cost and their low frequency of use. Our goal for PatentMonkey.com is to provide a top-quality service that allows users great tools and a professional interface typically only available through expensive subscription services or by physically going to the PTO's offices.

OK, so we're offering an efficient user interface for searching, the ability to add to and save a list and to download patent documents, and you may ask what the catch is. None, really, we have committed that, like the data underlying it, you should have free access to it. We are beginning to work with advertisers so that we can offer the basic functionality of our site for free.

We're a new site, with a lot of ideas to improve upon patent searching which we'll be rolling out in the coming months. We invite you to send us your thoughts at contact(at)patentmonkey(dot)com as your feedback is what we use to prioritize improvements.

PatentMonkey's President wrote to me and described what he believes are the four main strengths of its patent searching system:

1. Patent page dashboard to review patents at a high level to find ones worth a deeper review, including: a readable patent front page; option of claims, abstract or description sections; and navigation all optimized to one monitor screen.
2. Ability to create, save and share lists in Folders with others.  Since patent search results typically result in a number of interesting patents, we thought sharing those results with others (who can then surf them front page by front page as well) an important feature (saving and sharing a Folder requires registration).
3. Easy access to PDFs on any single patent page or bulk downloading of PDFs from a Folder.  While many sites offer one-off PDF access, we thought that searches that result in a number of results also creates the issue of getting a number of PDFs.  We designed bulk download as a way for searchers to avoid having to get all the PDFs to a client or co-worker.
4. Status of a patent, in terms of maintenance and expiration, is posted on each patent page and updated dynamically.  We find that in many cases, focus is put on patents as highlighting prior art without the ability to know if you can build upon it, or if it represents an issue.  We see many more ways to bring data to each patent’s page to make it a dashboard of information, instead of a set of disparate databases requiring different searches and more time.

PatentMonkey has started with U.S. issued patents (back to 1976) and plans on loading up design patents and applications quite soon.  Its advanced search capability is also in development.

I like the site, it has a lot of very useful features.  Some of the features that I found particularly of interest were the bulk patent PDF downloading, sharing of search results with other users accompanied by private notes and bulk patent number uploading.  Take a look yourself at PatentMonkey.