The UK Intellectual Property Office (UKIPO) has recently launched a new patent search tool, One IPO Search, which replaces the long-standing, and limited, IPSUM service.
And while it’s fair to say that it’s a significant step forward in terms of usability and modern design, it’s not quite the revolutionary leap forward that some might have hoped – at least in its present form.
Though for anyone who’s used IPSUM, One IPO Search will feel like a breath of fresh air. The interface is cleaner, you can search using keywords, and it’s now much easier to view, sort and download patent information. It’s also possible to create visualisation using charts, which can be helpful for tracking patent trends.
With that said, this isn’t currently a tool that’s built for serious prior art searching or detailed landscape analysis. Searches are currently limited to titles and abstracts, which means that unless your keywords appear up front in a patent, they’re unlikely to show up. For example, searching for something specific common word integers may yield no results at all, and even broader searches like can return a lot of irrelevant material.
While it’s a big improvement on IPSUM, especially for those wanting to look up specific UK patents or get a feel for what’s been filed in a particular area, it’s not (yet) a substitute for more robust commercial patent databases when it comes to deep, technical searching.
To the IPO’s credit, there are plans to build out more functionality over the next couple of years. Features like saved searches, alerts, AI-assisted searching and combined trade mark/design searching are all in the pipeline, and if delivered well, they could make One IPO Search far more powerful and valuable as tool for patent searching.
In the meantime, inventors and businesses should treat this tool for what it is: a long-overdue upgrade to a dated system that should make day-to-day tasks like tracking applications and reviewing patent statuses much easier. Further, the UKIPO has published this helpful tutorial video below to help innovators get started:
It’s progress and definitely a step in the right direction, just don’t expect it to replace more specialised tools for comprehensive patent searching any time soon.
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