Wednesday, June 19, 2013

The EP searching problem affects Patent Grabber

The EP searching problem that I posted about earlier affects Patent Grabber's ability to do EP searching. So for time being, any EP searches performed using Patent Grabber or Espacenet's "EP-only" collection will not return any hits that were published after August 22, 1012.

Sunday, June 16, 2013

EP searching using the "Advanced" option at worldwide.espacenet.com has a problem

If you use the Espacenet "Advanced" searching option and use the "collection" drop down to limit searching to only EP publications, there is a problem. No applications that were published after August 22, 2012 will be returned in your search results!

The EPO is aware of this problem, but the search page does not say anything about it. Their suggestion is to select the "Worldwide" option from the "collection" drop down, and put "EP" into the publication number field to limit search results to EP publications. This suggestion does not help if you wish to use full text searching since the EP collection provides for full text searching and the Worldwide collection does not.

Hopefully this issue will be fixed soon.