Differences between PubEAST/PubWEST and Patent Public Search

Operators

Patent Public Search has all of the same operators as in PubEAST/PubWEST. Most of the operators work the same way. However, because of the difference in Stopwords, the proximity operators may return different results.

Operator	Patent Public Search vs. legacy systems
OR	Operates the same way
AND	Operates the same way
NOT	Operates the same way
XOR	Operates the same way
WITHn	WITHn is not supported in the legacy systems, but is supported in Patent Public Search WITH operates the same way. However, Patent Public Search has fixed bugs regarding the end of a sentence in the legacy systems. For example, in PubEAST/PubWEST, “etc.” was considered the end of a sentence. If a document contained the sentence “The floor could be manufactured from wood, plastic, laminate, etc. and then be installed with glue”, a search for “floor WITH glue” would return hits in Patent Public Search but not PubEAST/PubWEST.
SAMEn	Operates the same way
ADJn	ADJn operates the same way. However, because of difference in Stopwords, examiners may see a difference in what documents are found. For example, a search for “blue ADJ green” would return a document containing “blue also green” or “blue with green” in PubEAST/PubWEST, but not in Patent Public Search. As a result, Patent Public Search performs a more accurate search. However, if a user is looking to return around the same number of hits, the user’s queries must be adjusted to increase the “n”.
NEARn	NEARn operates the same way. However, because of difference in Stopwords, examiners may see a difference in what documents are found. For example, a search for “blue NEAR green” would return a document containing “blue with green” or “green with blue” in PubEAST/PubWEST, but not in Patent Public Search. As a result, Patent Public Search performs a more accurate search. However, if a user is looking to return around the same number of hits, the user’s queries must be adjusted to increase the “n”.
x NOT SAME y (Not yet implemented)	Operates the same way
x NOT WITH y (Not yet implemented)	NOT WITHn is not supported in the legacy systems, but is supported in Patent Public Search NOT WITH operates the same way. However, Patent Public Search has fixed bugs regarding the end of a sentence that currently exist in the legacy systems. For example, in PubEAST/PubWEST, “etc.” was considered the end of a sentence. If a document contained the sentence “The floor could be manufactured from wood, plastic, laminate, etc. and then be installed with glue”, a search for “floor WITH glue” would return hits in Patent Public Search but not PubEAST/PubWEST.
x NOT ADJ y (Not yet implemented)	NOT ADJn operates the same way. However, because of difference in Stopwords, examiners may see a difference in what documents are found. For example, a search for “blue ADJ green” would return a document containing “blue or green” or “blue not green” in PubEAST/PubWEST, but not in Patent Public Search. As a result, Patent Public Search performs a more accurate search.
x NOT NEAR y (Not yet implemented)	NOT NEARn operates the same way. However, because of difference in Stopwords, examiners may see a difference in what documents are found. For example, a search for “blue NEAR green” would return a document containing “blue with green” or “green with blue” in PubEAST/PubWEST, but not in Patent Public Search. As a result, Patent Public Search performs a more accurate search. However, if a user is looking to return around the same number of hits, the user’s queries must be adjusted to increase the “n”.