I want to do a simple DIY patent search before filing a provisional patent, just to see if there's any prior art remotely similar to what I want to patent.
I remember using the USPTO website years ago and when you enter key words, a list of patents with their title shows up, from which you can quickly eliminate irrelevant patents.
It seems the USPTO has done away with that and now they have a "public search" tool where you can only see the patent numbers in the results, and have to click one by one to read each document.
This seems pretty inefficient and not user friendly. I wonder if I'm using the tool wrong. The user interface also seems a lot more complex. Please advise.
Thanks