When searching for patents, there are always noise patents that show up in your search query. Even after multiple iterations of your keyword search, there will be a few records that are found to be irrelevant after reading through their text. The usual next step for you is to figure out a way to exclude such records by adding a “NOT” segment to your query. And when you run out of safe “text patterns” to NOT out from your search query, the only remaining option is to create a long list of such numbers that are NOT’ed from the original query. Even then there may be family equivalents that still show up!

So if you have a shorter turnaround time for your search project, then perhaps your time is better spent making sure you are not missing out a relevant record instead of focussing on the NOTs. Also if you go fast on your NOT strategy, you may get unknowingly exclude a critical relevant record from your results. Working closely with professional patent searchers, we realised that considerable time is wasted in figuring out how remove these irrelevant records from the results.