Free Patent Databases - India and Worldwide

There are many patent databases in the market that allow one to perform a prior art search to determine the novelty of their invention. However, not all patent databases are available for free. Most of the powerful patent database such as Delphion, Micropatent, Patbase are paid services and cannot be used for running searches unless you have an account. So what does one do if they cannot afford to subscribe to such paid patent databases.

There are several freely available patent databases and search services that one can use to still perform an effective prior art search. The features available in the paid databases are obviously better and their coverage is more exhaustive but the freely available patent databases are fast catching up in terms of the features and services they provide to a searcher/inventor.

Below is a list of freely available patent databases that can be used for performing prior art searches. A majority of these patent database cover jurisdictions such as US, EP, JP and WO (WIPO). Go ahead and explore them!

USPTO
Espacenet
PatentScope
Freepatentsonline.com
PatentDocs
FreshPatents
SumoBrain
Google Patents
PatentLens
WikiPatents
Patents.com
IP.COM
GetthePatent
PatentFamily
Priorsmart
PatentGenius
PatentStorm
PatentTools
PatentsSearcher
PatSnap
IPEXL

For the benefit of those who are looking for some free Indian patent databases, try the following:

BigPatents
Ekaswa A  (Patent applications filed January 1995 onwards)
Ekaswa B (Patent applications notified for opposition from January 1995 onwards)
CIPIS

Please notify me if there are more such free tools and services available on the internet.

In case you are looking to search specifically for a country, then simply type the name of the country along with patent office and the first result on Google should help you.

Happy Searching!