Beginning in September 2022, utility patent examiners at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) began conducting prior art searches through the Similarity Search tool (SimSearch), an AI-assisted feature aimed at helping examiners more effectively locate documents similar to the application they are searching. Examiners maintain freedom of discretion when deciding whether or not to apply the search results.

SimSearchis intended to augment-not replace-other search tools and is available to examiners through our internal search tool, Patents End-to-End (PE2E) Search, which is built on a web-based, modern platform in the cloud. It uses the text of the application being searched to generate the AI search query and provide ranked search results. As the text of the application under review is updated via amendments, updated search results can be easily generated using SimSearch. Additionally, SimSearchenables examiners to refine search results by emphasizing selected application information and thereby more readily identify relevant prior art and similar documents.