Google Patents includes over 120 million patent publications from 100+ patent offices around the world, as well as many more technical documents and books indexed in Google Scholar and Google Books, and documents from the Prior Art Archive.
Patents
We currently index full-text documents from the following patent offices:
- United States
- Europe
- Japan
- China
- South Korea
- WIPO
- Russia
- Germany
- The United Kingdom
- Canada
- France
- Spain
- Belgium
- Denmark
- Finland
- Luxembourg
- The Netherlands
- Austria
- Australia
- Brazil
- Switzerland
- Taiwan
You can see the real-time number of documents that are included from each patent office by clicking on "around the world" on patents.google.com. These totals include all patents and published applications in our index, but we cannot guarantee complete coverage. If we're missing anything, please file feedback.
Many documents have full-text description and claims available. The "Since ..." dates listed on the statistics graph show when full-text is available, but additional abstract-only documents are often available for earlier dates.
Patents with only non-English text have been machine-translated to English and indexed, so you can search patent publications using only English keywords.
Non-patent literature
New ideas are often published either as patent applications or in academic journals. If you are searching for prior art to a patent application, it is critical in many fields to also search for non-patent literature to get a complete view of the state of the art.
To make prior art searching easier, Google Patents includes a copy of the technical documents and books indexed in Google Scholar and Google Books. These documents have been machine-classified using the Cooperative Patent Classification scheme commonly used in patent searching to make finding documents easier.
You can browse the citation metrics for the top publications in Google Scholar Metrics to get an overview of the types and sources of papers included, and see Google Scholar help for details on what papers are included.
The Prior Art Archive project includes old product manuals and announcements from companies around the world. These documents are also indexed and machine-classified in Google Patents.