In addition to discovering US patents, Google Patents is now searching the European Patent Office as well. A new feature of this search engine is the Prior Art Finder, a great tool that allows to determine the novelty of a patent.

The Prior Art Finder identifies key phrases from the text of the patent, combines them into a search query, and displays relevant results from Google Patents, Google Scholar, Google Books, and the rest of the web.

For more information about this and other amazing things happening at Google, check out their Research Blog.

For extra information on patents have a look at the UQ Library Patents Guide.