There are lots of places online that you can do a free patent search. In order to do a good one, you will need to dedicate at least 16 hours to it, or roughly two working days. There are also many patent attorneys, or other qualified entities that will preform a patent search for you, of course you should use an NDA to prevent any loss of your intellectual property.

Don't loose the inventors ability to be vauge with people asking questions, when it's the computer asking the questions. All the more reason to be caustions because the computer is a lot more like an elephant than anyone else you may disclose to.

The reason to avoid this is simple. When you type in, battery powered earmuffs for example. This shows up as a search string in the websites log, the website you are preforming the search on. You don't know who runs that server, and you certainly don't know who has access to those logs. You might think that the chance of tampering is slight, because who would watch search strings searching to steal Intellectual property. I ask you however, if someone was wanting to look for search strings from which to glean IP, where would they be? Wouldn't a patent search database log be the perfect place to look?

Prior Art is the term given to the contents of patents refereced by a patent applicant. It means that when you apply for your patent, anything that your invention involves that came before it must be referenced by patent number in a section entitled "prior art"

The patent office expects to see a sizable prior art list on the majority of applications it recieves, and as time goes on the longer these lists will become.

There are four main things that you want to obtain to refference the proir art you find. The patent number, the name of the patent, the issue date of the patent, and the name of the inventor.

The patent application may not require all of this information, but it could come in handy if they are unable to locate it, or you are unable to locate it again. Such a circumstance may arise, and since you have set aside the time to find the information, you may as well try and hold onto it.

Time and money, time and money, I sound like a broken record. The truth is though, these are two very important factors in getting your invention out of your mind and onto the shelves. Time and money are the two biggest factors standing in your way. With enough time and money you can sell anything, but is that really what you want to do?

If you do not complete this step, you may develop the invention and reduce it to practice only to discover that it is exactly the same as something patented two years (months, weeks or days) ago. Now what good is it? You have one to use and enjoy, but you will not profit from it the way you had hoped. This may lead you down the road of contacting the other invetor, asking to license rights to the patent only so you can see you invention produced by you. The profit margin goes way down, and the other inventor got the best surprise in thier life when you called wanting to license thier patent right out of the blue.