Best practices for Amplified searching

This article is a step-by-step guide to effective and efficient searching in Amplified.

Searching in Amplified starts with natural language to quickly find relevant patents. You'll then use keywords to focus on your interest and save relevant results to find more like them. Use time-saving features like relevant text extraction, summaries, and Ask Amplified to review quickly. Finally, you can ask generative AI to help reinforce your search by brainstorming similar terms.

For this guide, we'll be using a Custom project. Let's get started!

First, describe what you're looking for

Amplified uses text descriptions and patents to rank patents by overall similarity. To get the most precise results, add a short text description describing what you're looking for.

Next, skim the initial results

Results should capture the right technical field and generally not include noise. Skim the titles in the first page to verify this. If the results look noisy, you can almost always fix that by being more specific in your text description.

📝 To get used to how the system works, try changing your text input and observing how the results change.

Add keywords as a reading assistant

Now you have a good, dense list of relevant results. Add keywords to define your interest. This will highlight the results. Turn on Relevant text to automatically extract the parts of the patent with your keywords.

Turn Filters ON and search using bullseye keywords

Turn Boolean Filters are ON and click Update results. This will use your keywords for to limit results to only those that match. This is a powerful way to rapidly identify at least one very relevant result.

You can use the checkboxes to specify which fields to search in. In the example above, we want to see flux control in title, abstract, or claims so we unchecked Descriptions. Unchecking all of the boxes will make that keyword color group highlight-only

Save relevant patents to learn from them

As you review results use the Checkmark, Flag, and Hide buttons to keep track of what you've reviewed.

When you use the Checkmark to save a result as Relevant, you can click Update results to automatically learn from them. Amplified does not use Flagged or Hidden results for learning.

Hiding the results that aren't relevant helps you avoid wasting time on the same results as you iteratively search.

Iterate and use AI to help reinforce your search

Try adding different keywords to explore results from different perspectives. Add keywords and save results to iteratively build your search and efficiently find the most relevant patents.

To reinforce your search and avoid missing important, useful information you can use AI to brainstorm similar terms. Click on the green + icon next to a keyword group to suggest similar terms.

Generate AI summaries to get a quick overview of the problems and solutions in a particular technology field.

Use Ask Amplified to extract very specific information from documents without needing to read them all one-by-one.

Advanced techniques

Some searches are harder than others. Amplified has tools to help with these cases. Here are some additional options to explore:

Strategically use wildcards (* and ? ) or proximity operators (keyword1 W5 keyword2 )
Upload a list of results from a complimentary tool such as CAS/STN
Add a traditional query using complex Boolean logic

Use AI for a final quality assurance

As a final step, we recommend turning the filters off and updating results. This is a great way to catch any potentially still relevant results that you haven't found yet.