Free text searching cam be used for Novelty, Patentability, State of the Art and Freedom-to-Operate searches, for example.

This guide covers the basic steps of carrying out a Free Text search for an invention, when you have either Claims of a patent application available - either as draft versions or as filed, or an Invention Disclosure or other tecnhical description.

English is the native language of IPRally and optimal as input. German, French, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, Italian, Dutch, Danish, Finnish and Swedish are supported via machine translation (with a maximum 5000 characters). The translation happens inside IPRally, making it secure.

The input for Free Text search needs to be in natural language, i.e. in full sentences, and including articles and punctuation etc. This is because the AI is trained with natural language inputs, which maximizes the capability of Graph AI to understand and compare technologies.

Professionally drafted Claims are an optimal input for IPRally, since the graph AI is trained with millions of professionally drafted claims.

Free Text Search takes your input and curates a Knowledge Graph for searching. The results are listed in AI Score order. For more information, please read Processing the Results (including descriptions of 'AI Scores').

The guide is specifically intended for

The basic steps of a Free Text search are:

1. Enter the whole Claims Set/Invention Disclosure/Project scope to the Free text search field

2. Review the search results

3. Mark the best findings as Favorites

4. Re-run the search using Zoom to Favorites

Additionally you can (but not covered in this guide):

Good: "The invention is a vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication system for autonomous vehicles, using both wireless technologies (WiFi, LTE, 5G) and RFID. The system has a dual-module framework that dynamically switches between high-bandwidth and low-bandwidth communication modes to optimize data transmission. The system enhances safety, efficiency, and passenger interaction in autonomous vehicles."

Poor: "A V2V system for autonomous vehicles using wireless tech and RFID to enhance safety."

Why? The good example has technical details around the objects, and how they interact to deliver the function being searched. There are functional relationships described, and the language is descriptive vs. prompting. The poor example is too broad, lacking functional relationships, and doesn't describe the technology well enough. The results will be too vague compared to the good input.

* (Curated using Generative AI - resemblance to any prior art is by chance)

Don't use a "ChatGPT style" Generative AI prompting with Free Text search, e.g. "Please find...". Just describe the invention/technology of interest in natural language.

For some FAQ/Best Practice, please click here (or scroll down to the end of the article)

A Claim is a great input for IPRally. You can use individual claims or whole Claim sets.

Statistically, a whole Claims set alone is proven to provide almost as accurate search results as using a whole patent text, and is usually a sufficient input for a high-quality search. If available, we suggest starting with all claims to get a high-quality overview of technology in the area. Individual claim searches may better capture also "accidental Prior Art" and help to further optimize claim scope or assess the strength of the claims.

If you don't have a Claim Set, a technical description/invention disclosure is a great input. The key is an input which describes embodiments according to the technical requirement in more concrete terms and with more specific examples, or the part that gives more context or technical field information for the invention.

IPRally provides many functionalities for processing the search results both inside the platform and by exporting data into another review platform.

The result list and expanding the bibliographic data:

Result List:

Expanded Bibliographic Data:

Showing image mosaics:

AI-based relevant passage highlighting:

If the closest prior art appears among the results of IPRally, you can click the heart symbol to make the hit a Favorite.

If, for some reason (yes, that happens 😊), the closest prior art is not among the hits of IPRally, you can manually enter the publication in the Favorites tab:

You are able to add multiple documents here as well:

We recommend using 1-5 best hits as favorites. Provided that they do not contain a lot of contradictory information, carrying out the next step (step 4) usually improves the quality of the search results. Please see our article on Zoom to Favorites for more guidance

Toggling Zoom to Favorites on and pressing SEARCH PATENTS again, will utilize the Favorites information (together with the original graph) to find more relevant hits.

Note: you can track the new hits in the list using the VIEWED status of the hits (Blue: Un-Viewed / White: Viewed). You can easily 'hide viewed' under the View Options to only see which new results appear with the new search:

The viewed status changes also automatically, if you open the full document view.

Once you have re-run the search, get back to the analysis step 2 and repeat iteratively, if needed.