Last week Google launched a Patent Search, currently it’s quite limited in its scope: it only searches US Patents before mid 2006, about 7 million patents (although Google have said that they plan to extend this).

The technology behind the Patent Search is similar to Google’s Book Search – which means you can zoom in and scroll through the text. However, unlike the Book Search the Patent Search doesn’t include the ubiquitous ‘Sponsored Links’.

While it will be interesting to see how the patent search service develops over time I’m also keen to see how Google plan to bring together the ever burgeoning set of search services; although to be honest, like a lot of people, I’ve been interested in this for a few years now.

To be fair Google have done work in this area, for example, the partial integration of the image and news search into the main search is nice. However, the dominant impression is one of a series of separate searches concealed beneath a more » link. At the very least I would like to be able to choose which services are available above the search bar.