Online patent information: Perspectives for the future

There is a constantly improving technical environment for online searching but despite this it is, at present, far from supplanting other methods of patent searching. There is no doubt that patent information will become increasingly important although it is not user-friendly because of its volume, legal language and difficulty of retrieval. Online is criticised for being unable to converge on the few results required. The problems of online are: that the time necessary for learning the systems is too great for many potential users; the different procedures required by different hosts create frustrations; and that recall and precision are poor. Effective information retrieval requires pre-indexing or other intellectual input and text searching is a poor substitute. However, online is still the only serious competition to traditional searching of hard copy files so that the future of online could be positive if there are increased efforts on improving user-friendliness and pre-indexing.