Free Engineering Information Resources

The full-text database offers all US patents issued since 1790, in the form of searchable patent numbers and current US classifications hyperlinked to full-page images of each page of each patent.

With Google Patents, you can search and read the full text of patents granted and patent applications from around the world. If you're looking for prior art, you can use the integrated Prior Art Finder tool and Google Scholar documents to find patent and non-patent prior art, all in one interface. Google Patents includes patent applications and patents granted from the USPTO, EPO, WIPO, DPMA, CIPO and SIPO. Patents without English full text are machine-translated into English, so that foreign patent documents are searchable using only English keywords. Documents from Google Scholar have been classified with Cooperative Patent Classification (CPC) codes using a machine-classification model, to make it easier to search non-patent literature in a patent searching context.

Espacenet is a database of patent information created by the European Patent Office. It contains patents from the European Patent Office, the WIPO, and a number of other countries.