Searching for patents in a specific area can be quite difficult to the untrained practitioner. The USPTO database is hard to navigate, and coming up with appropriate search terms is always daunting. I came across a really useful set of tutorials at the UT McKinney Engineering Library site. My favorite tutorial was the generic patent searching tutorial; however, the statistics and application tutorials were great as well. The USPTO also has their own guide to patent searches but it doesn’t have the same “bang” as the ones by the UT Library.
If you ever are looking for something silly, or need a really quick and dirty search, Google Patents is probably the best bet. It’s easy to find things like finger-puppet patents as seen in the illustration to the right.
