U.S. Patent Public Search

The USPTO's Patent Public Search system contains more than 11 million US patents issued from 1790 to the present and 7 million US published applications from 2001 forward. Full-text patents are searchable from 1976 forward. PDF documents and OCR text are available prior to 1976. Patent documents are classified under the Cooperative Patent Classification (CPC) and International Patent Classification (IPC) systems. New patents are issued weekly on Tuesdays; new applications are published on Thursdays.