Q: What is the best way to search and see if a product idea that i have is already currently patented?
A:
You either have to do a patent search yourself, or hire a patent attorney or a patent searcher to do it for you.
As with anything, obviously someone who does searches for his/her living will do a better job than you can, but many people do searches themselves to do a good enough job for their purpose.
If you want to do a search yourself, then go to the Patent Office website, and spend some time searching for various keyword, word strings, combinations of words, and their synonym. You may want limit it by classes. If you’ve never done searches, it will take you a long time to get what you are looking for. You are going have to do dozens or hundreds of searches to fish out the most relevant patents. You have to be patient.
How do you know when you’ve done enough? It is tough to tell, but generally when your queries come up with lists of patents where the most relevant patents are those that you’ve already seen dozens of times in previous searches, you may be getting point to diminishing returns.
Good luck!
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