This database is freely available to the general public via the Internet.

​Google Patents includes over 120 million patent publications from 100_ patent offices around the world including the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), European Patent Office (EPO), World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), Deutsches Patent und Markenamt (DPMA), Canadian Intellectual Property Office (CIPO), and China's State Intellectual Property Office (SIPO). Patents without English full text are machine-translated to English, so you can search foreign patent documents using only English keywords.

HOW TO SEARCH GOOGLE PATENTS
From the homepage, you can begin your search in a few ways:

• Enter a patent publication or application number, such as [US9014905B1], [9014905], or [US 14/166,502]
• Enter freeform text, such as [autonomous vehicle camera]
  • You can also enter ["exact phrases"] and metadata restricts [assignee:"Google Inc"], [inventor:page], and [before:2001].
  • Note: inventor and assignee names must be entered using the prefixes.
  • If you are looking for prior art, check the "Include non-patent literature" box to include results from Google Scholar.
• Paste a large block of text, such as a paragraph, to run the Prior Art Finder keyword extractor to suggest search terms.

After you begin your search, your search query is displayed on the left side of the page. The "Search Terms" section contains text keywords that match patent title, abstract, claims and description, and the full text of Scholar documents, as well as CPC codes. Each search term and search field box is ANDed together, and you can add an OR to each term by clicking inside a box to the right of the existing query term. After you change your query, click away from the box or press ENTER to perform the search.

Varies by country, oldest is 1836 for U.S. patents.