Google Patents is a great place to start your patent search. To access the Google Patents Search, start with their Advanced Search option, located on the bottom of the page, as seen highlighted in the image bellow:

This Advanced Search page will allow you to search more precisely within Google Patents' search engine. 

Patents are government documents that are awarded by the US Patent and Trademark Office.

For more information on patent searching, you can watch an online training session hosted by USPTO.

 Google Patents has built in functionality to impose Boolean Logic. 

Boolean Searching: A search technique that uses Boolean Operators (AND, OR, NOT) to limit or widen your search.

Boolean operators define the relationship between your search terms, allowing you to refine and focus your results.

• AND narrows your results by linking two terms together
• OR widens your results by bringing up results that have one term or another or both
• NOT restricts your search by excluding the term directly following it - it's a great operator to use if your search is retrieving a lot of irrelevant results!

The Advanced Search in Google Patents has a menu on the left hand side.  This is the search box. If you type in one term, another box will appear below it.  You can input keywords, Patent Numbers, and classification strings in these boxes in order to create a more precise search. 

It is important to cluster your keywords around concepts that are related (use synonyms) in the same box, and switch concepts between boxes. The resulting patents are displayed in relevance order. The items that are on the top of page 1 have higher frequencies of the terms that you searched for than those on page 2 or 10.  This allows for more efficient scanning of results.  

When you find a patent that looks relevant, click on the title or patent number to open the record. 

When searching for patents, the vocabulary you'll be using is quite different from how you normally would search for an item. Attempting to search for a patent using the  product's commercial name is unlikely to return the results you are looking for. For example, when you try to search for a patent on the toy koosh balls in Google Patents, the patents that are pulled up are completely unrelated to the toy ball. 

This happens because the language used in patenting items is legal terminology that describes the function or innovation of the patent. The keywords used in naming patents describe the item's design. Commercial naming for marketing happens through a separate process, generally after the completion of the patent process. Therefore, the commercial name is not listed in the patent fulltext. Our koosh ball's patent name is actually, "Generally spherical object with floppy filaments to promote sure capture", for example. 

The patent for the item includes images of the technical drawings of the innovation. You can use these images to confirm that you have found a patent that describes the item that you are looking for.

When you search for a patent for your project, try to describe the characteristics of item or intellectual property contribution.  Instead of a 3 ring binder, I might search for "hard shell container for loose leaf paper featuring clamping mechanism".

If you're still having trouble with finding your patent, you can also search in Google Search Engine for the commercial name of the product you are looking for and "patent", and that generally will pull up the desired patent within the first few results, as both Google Search Engine and Google Patents sort searches by relevance. 

Finding additional patents is straightforward once you have identified a specific patent that is relevant to your search terms. 

When you open the record for a specific patent, you will see a title at the top, and the most commonly used metadata (labels about the patent) in the box with a blue banner on the right hand side. 

Classification codes are used to “co-locate” or link patents on similar (very specific) topics. These classification codes can be used to navigate between patents on the same topic. 

You can also use the references or “Prior Art” linked to a patent to find similar items. 

The references can be found when you open the .pdf of the patent, on the first page. These references are the specific patents from which the claims of novelty were made (I.e. this patent does something that the references listed do not.). Therefore these patents are closely related to the patent that you just found. 

In the image above, the classifications for these resource patents are listed. In the left hand column, 51, 52 and 58 show the classifications that this patent was assigned by a patent examiner. Therefore, you are able to see how the reference patent classifications are related to the classifications for the patent you are interested in. Based on this information the reference patent by Haubs (612,663) is closely related by patent classification, as well as a reference. It may be a good next reference to check. 

You can also navigate by classification on the Google Patent screen. Click on the classification code listed on the record. 

The classification definition tells you in laymen’s terms what the main classification is for the patent you are interested in. If you click on it, it will retrieve other patents assigned to that classification code.  You can also look at the hierarchy of the classification code to find more detailed or less detailed classifications related to your current patent.  You can similarly click on those to see related patents.