Search Fundamentals

This information will help you craft queries that produce relevant and manageable result sets.  These fundamentals apply to patent, business, and literature searches. 

Contents of this section include:

• Search Operators Summarized

• Search Operators in Detail

• Default Operators

• Operator Precedence

• Case Sensitivity

• Stopwords

• Reserved Words

• Hyphenated Words

• Exact Words vs Stemming

• Search Special Characters

Detailed information on the forms, fields, and strategies specific to patent, business, or literature searching can be found in:

• Searching Patents

• Searching Business Content

• Searching Literature

Search Operators Summarized

Search Operators in Detail

A search operator is a word or symbol used for expressing a function that should be performed with the specified keywords.

In the following examples, the search operators are shown as all uppercase and, when you use the search form tools to construct your queries, they will also be shown as upper case.  This is, however, not a requirement and is done only to visually differentiate the operators from the surrounding keywords.

On search forms, you can choose operators from drop downs or add them using convenient buttons.  You can also enter them yourself when constructing queries from scratch.

Default Operators

On your Search Preferences screens, for patent, literature, and business searching, you can set default operators to be used between fields and within fields.

Between fields, you can choose to use AND, OR, or NOT as your default.

Within fields, you can choose to use AND, OR, or ADJ as your default.

See more about search preferences.

Operator Precedence

Query expressions are read using specific rules of operator precedence. This means that certain operators are processed before others. While query expressions are read from left to right, some operators are processed before others and impacts the way the search engine treats your query.

The following shows the order or precedence in which operators are processed:

This following example shows how the precedence rules can impact the manner in which the search engine processes your query.

If you want to search for patents about feline disease or ferret disease, and you enter

ferret OR feline AND disease

because AND is treated before OR, the search engine will interpret your query to mean this

ferret OR (feline AND disease)

and your result set will include records with feline and disease or records with ferret that may or may not include the term disease.
 
This is a better way to construct the query

(ferret OR feline) AND disease

Now all records in your result set will contain the word disease and either the word feline or the word ferret.

Case Sensitivity

Queries can be entered in upper, lower, or mixed case.

Stopwords

Stopwords have not been implemented in this system. 

Reserved Words

Certain other words, e.g., AND, NOT, OR, SAME, WITH, and NEAR are reserved for use as operators, and, if your search string includes a reserved word, it will be interpreted as an operator.  Reserved words can be searched in the database, but must be entered within double quotes to distinguish them from operators. 

To search for a reserved word per se, type the word in double quotes: e.g., "near".  To search for the phrase 'near field', you should type the following: "NEAR" ADJ FIELD.

Hyphenated Words

In order to effectively search for hyphenated terms, you need to understand how they are indexed. In the patent database, hyphens are not indexed; they are treated as if they were a space. If a hyphenated term is used in a search query, it is converted to an adjacency syntax.  Note that this holds true even when the hyphen is enclosed in quotation marks.

So, for example "computer-related" is equivalent to "computer related" and "semi-conductor" is equivalent to "semi conductor".  To search for the former, you would type

computer ADJ related

To search for semi-conductor, you would want to search

semi ADJ conductor OR semiconductor

where the adjacency operator (ADJ) will account for both the hyphenated and the non-hyphenated forms and "semiconductor" will find those instances where the word is spelled without hyphen or space.

Exact Words vs. Stemming

Stemming extends a search to cover different variations of a word.  This means when you search on a word like prime, your result set will include words that share a root, or stem, with the word you searched. So, for prime, your result set will include words like primed, priming, primaries, and primates.

Stemming is a linguistic process and your results will include linguistic expansions of the stem word. Use wildcards for a result set that includes all expansions of a stem or word.  Stemming is not applied to any search term that includes a wildcard.
 

By default, stemming is Off.  Change the default to On from your Search Preferences screen.  See more information on search preferences and defaults.

Searching Special Characters

Greek Characters

In the Innovation patent database, which is compiled from multiple sources, Greek characters are sometimes represented by the Greek character itself for example α, and sometimes by its transliteration, alpha.  Although no attempt has been made to convert the transliterated version of Greek characters into character entities, character entities have been uniformly converted to decimal Unicode.

You may search for any character in the Greek alphabet, either upper or lower case, by entering it in the search text box.  Enter characters either by cutting and pasting from another document, or by using the Windows Character Map

Example:

α

When you search for Greek characters using the actual character, as shown above, only the case you have specified is found.

Alternatively, you may enter characters of the Greek alphabet by typing the name of the character as spelled in English, both preceded by and followed by a period.

For example:

.alpha.

.gamma.

.epsilon.

When you search for Greek characters using the .word. format, as shown above, both upper and lower case characters are found.

Usage

You wish to find any documents containing any of the following character strings:

tnf α

tnfα

tnf alpha

Your search query would look like this:

tnf adj α or tnfα or tnf adj alpha

Note that in the example above, the syntax allows for the possibility that some records contain the Greek entity for alpha, while in other records, the word alpha is used.

Decimal Unicode

Aureka indexes Greek characters as Decimal Unicode entities.  Therefore the search query shown in the example above will appear in your Search History as:

tnf adj α or tnfα or tnf adj alpha

As an alternative to cut and paste or the .word. format, you may search for Greek characters using Decimal Unicode values, as shown above.

See the Table of Unicode Values, below, for a complete listing.

Other Special Characters

You may enter the degree sign by typing

.deg.

The number sign (#) and the ampersand (&) may be searched without using either periods or double quotes.

Table of Unicode Values