(Sacramento) September 6, 2006 – Today, intellectual property management software company, PatentCafe www.PatentCafe.com launched the industry’s first Heuristic Boolean, or “SuperBoolean” patent search engine for patent attorneys, professional patent searchers, engineering managers and intellectual property managers.

The extremely powerful Heuristic Boolean engine relevancy ranks patent search results using a Latent Semantic Analysis database as its expert system. The most significant patent search advancement since the introduction of the IBM Patent Server in 1997, PatentCafe’s SuperBoolean engine helps patent professionals discover more prior art faster, resulting in higher quality patent applications, and faster patent issuances.

In July, the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) announced a new proposed rule change intended to encourage patent applicants to provide the USPTO with the most relevant prior art patents related to their inventions. It said that some applicants send a very large number of documents with their applications, tending to obscure the most relevant information. Applicants submitting only the most relevant prior art citations will see their applications get processes more quickly.

Legacy Boolean patent search engines require researchers to craft lengthy, complicated search queries using many keywords that the researcher hopes will appear in the most relevant documents.

But the very process of adding more keywords to a search query, while necessary to pare down the number of search results to a quantity that the researcher can manually review, actually increases the number of missed-but-relevant patents exponentially.

Andy Gibbs, PatentCafe’s CEO notes that “the early-adopter Fortune 500 companies and government agencies have found that our SuperBoolean search engine uncovers highly relevant patents that traditional search engines miss. In two recent cases, more than 25 relevant patents were found that traditional commercial patent search engines failed to discover.”

PatentCafe’s SuperBoolean engine allows researchers to search with fewer keywords, and see the most relevant patents at the top of the search results list. Not only is the process significantly faster than the old iterative Boolean process, it helps ensure that the fewest relevant patents are missed. The time-saving benefit was estimated by one Beta site to be more than $17,000 annually for each full time researcher.

A searcher who enters the keywords “heated”, “automobile” and “seat”, along with a second, Heuristic query that fully describes the invention being searched, using about 100 words in natural, conversational English, the most relevant patents get listed first, such as “ Heated child safety seat” and “ Automatic temperature controlled seats”. “Junk” patents that the researcher would otherwise have to sift through are pushed to the bottom of the list.

More importantly, finding the most relevant prior art before filing new patent applications also helps mitigate the risks of the runaway costs of future patent infringement, such as the $480 million award to Paragon Trade Brands by Weyerhaeuser Co., the $465 million award to Lexar by Toshiba, or the now infamous $521 verdict in Eolas verses Microsoft.

SuperBoolean patent search is the latest feature to be added to the company’s Intellectual Capital Office (ICO Suite) of patent research and analysis software applications for enterprise.

A detailed white paper that discusses the Heuristic Boolean search engine is downloadable at

http://www.patentcafe.com/library/whitepapers/SuperBoolean_whitepaper.pdf