It’s not uncommon for an inventor to think that there is nothing like their invention on the market already. This is probably because the inventor has just come up with this idea and has not seen anything similar since coming up with the idea.
But the reality is, that there is often something else already out there that is at least similar, if not the same as the inventor’s idea. This is why I always urge inventors to do a prior art search before investing a lot of time and money on their invention.
There are several fairly straightforward (and inexpensive) strategies an inventor can use to find out if their idea already exists.
A good place to start is with a general Internet search (Google, Bing, Yahoo). Try to be as descriptive of your invention as possible when choosing your keywords (without being overly narrow so that you miss relevant ideas).
Next, check with online retailers who sell related product lines. Check Amazon.com and other online retailers. If your idea is for a specialty product, check with specialty retailers. For example, if your idea is for an electrician’s tool, check with electrician suppliers.
If you don’t find your product online, try heading down to your local department store, and ask the salesperson where they carry products that are similar to your idea (but don’t tell the salesperson what your idea is!). Then browse that section of the store. You might be surprised what someone else has already thought of. You may just have never seen it, because, well, you weren’t looking until you had this idea!
If you still can’t find anything like your idea, either online or in stores, you can try heading over to the US Patent Office website. The US Patent Office has a free online database of all patents ever issued (yes, all the way back to 1790), and all patent applications published since 2001. Developing a good search strategy using the US Patent Office databases can be tricky. Don’t spend too much time here.
Instead, hire a patent attorney to do a patentability search and analysis for you. Often when I provide the search results to a client, the inventor says “I didn’t realize there were already so many products so similar to mine.”
That’s why we do the prior art search. It’s better to find out that your idea already exists before you spend too much money filing a patent application for your invention with the US Patent Office, only to have your patent application rejected because someone else already had your idea.
