[time-nuts] Google Patent Search is Broken
Mike Monett
xde-l2g3 at myamail.com
Wed Jul 1 01:27:17 UTC 2009
The Google patent search is a very useful for studying GPS
technology, precision oscillators, etc. It has been extremely
reliable in the past, but today it started giving an error message
after downloading only 5 patents. The error message is:
Google Error
Forbidden Your client does not have permission to get URL
/patents/download/xxx.pdf?id=yyyy from this server.
Rebooting and clearing the cookies didn't help. I have a static IP,
so Google knows when I am trying to download a patent, and it gives
this error message instead.
There are a few other free patent services, but they require logging
on, they aren't as easy to use, and they don't have the search
options that google has. They also give larger pdf files than
google. For example, here is US patent #6134065 by an old friend,
Steve Brittenham, who used to work at HP Boisie:
Service Bytes
FreePatent : 80,794
Wikipatent : 543,465
Google : 66,014
The urls are
http://www.freepatentsonline.com/
http://www.wikipatents.com/
Another service I often use is www.pat2pdf.org, but it seems to be
offline today.
So the best option is still google, but how to get around the static
ip problem?
The solution is a free proxy. There are many on the web - this one
works fine:
http://www.freeproxysite.com/
I used the "TOP 10 proxies by clicks", and selected German-Proxy.de
From there, I went to
http://www.google.com/advanced_patent_search?hl=en&num=30
entered a patent number, and downloaded it with no problems.
I don't know what is causing the problem at google, but this appears
to solve it. If you run into this and find it starts giving problems
again, just select another proxy and continue working!
Mike
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