To search with a combination of words, simply enter the words seperated by spaces. For example to find all patents having both the word laser and the word printer in the title, the following query can be used:

Searching With Phrases

To search for phrases in esp@cenet , the string of characters should be enclosed by double quotation marks. For example, to find patents having in the title the word laser followed immediately by the word printer:

Extending a Search using truncation and wildcards

You can use wildcard characters to expand your search to include for example plural forms of a word.

There are three different wildcard characters available:

• *  -  Substitutes for a string of characters of any length
• ?  -  Substitutes for zero or one characters
• #  -  Substitutes for exactly one character

For example, to find patents having in the title the word car or cars:

Note that there are a number of restrictions on the use of wildcards, in particular:

• There can be no alphanumeric characters following a wildcard (colo?r is not allowed, but colo?? is)
• Wildcards are only supported in the fields Title, Title and abstract, Inventor and Applicant
• There must be at least two alphanumeric characters preceding a ? or # symbol
• If two alphanumeric characters preced a ? or # symbol, then a maximum of 3 truncation symbols is allowed.
• If three or more alphanumeric characters preced a ? or # symbol, then up to 7 truncation symbols are allowed.
• There must be at least three alphanumeric characters preceding a * symbol

Note also that in particular use of the * symbol can lead to a significant increase in the time taken for a search to be performed.