Frequently Asked Questions

Claim Sleuth is a search engine that helps you identify possible restrictions on freedom-to-operate or possible infringements. It employs advanced artificial intelligence and indexing techniques to quickly and precisely search independent claims in all active US utility patents. It is regularly updated with newly granted patents as they are published.
In order to use Claim Sleuth, you have to create an account first. It is free and only requires a valid email address. After logging in, you will be redirected to the web interface of Claim Sleuth. There are free trials for you to experience the state of the art performance of Claim Sleuth. You can either download a randomly sampled claim or draft your own idea description for the testing purposes. It is important to clearly describe your idea and use punctuation to separate key aspects (as in the sample claims) for best matching performance.
Yes! You can narrow the search results by clicking the icon at the upper right corner of the input area to restrict assignee, class, title or claim text using regular expressions or a simple key word. You can broaden the search results to include less semantically similar statements by activating the broad switch.
There are no commitments or fixed charges; you pay only for what you use. Each submitted description is parsed into query fragments using content as well as punctuation. At the end of the month, you are charged $0.75 per query fragment submitted during that month.
A query fragment is the basic input unit into which a submitted description is split for matching and billing purposes. It is important to encapsulate individual components of your idea into a query fragment for best results. Specifically, a description is split into query fragments using commas, colons, semicolons as boundaries then merging text between these boundaries as needed to ensure no query fragment has fewer than six informative terms. This approach has been observed to work well with most published independent claims, so it is advisable to mimic the composition of these for your own idea descriptions.
Once your free trials are exhausted, you have to enter credit card information if you wish to perform additional searches. Your credit card will be charged at the end of each month according to the number of query fragments submitted during that month.
Go to the contact page after logging in and send a message. Your questions will be addressed via email as soon as possible.