The QueryFlow tool differs from the Keyword Analyzer in several ways:

• QueryFlow uses a powerful algorithm called TF/IDF (Term Frequency/Inverse Document Frequency) to find "important" terms in the source document.
• QueryFlow defaults to a Boolean OR operator compared to the Boolean AND in the Keyword Tool.
• Terms are weighted using Query Flow.

An "important" term is defined as a term that appears in the patent with a high frequency but does not appear very often in the entire patent corpus.  As a result, TF/IDF doesn't need stop terms.  Terms like the, and, but, with etc appear so often in the corpus that they are never identified as "important" terms.  Even "patentese" terms such as method, apparatus, system appear so frequently in patent data that the algorithm never deems them "important."

Because of the weighting, and the nature of the Boolean OR operator, QueryFlow does a much better job of creating inclusive lists.  But the list can be very large.  The most relevant patents will be displayed at the top of the search result list.

Term weighting boosts a term's relevance in the search results and increases the overall precision of your query.  Patents with higher weighted terms appear higher in the search results.  Weighting terms does NOT impact the recall, which means the same number of documents will be returned by the search engine no matter what weighting you use.  But the order in which they appear will be affected.

The priority date of a patent application can be searched using the PRIRD field code.  A patent's priority date can be as late as the filing date or  many years prior to the patent's file date.  Patents receive earlier priority dates for many reasons.

• There was an earlier provisional application filed.
• It is a child application from a previously filed PCT application.
• It is a continuation (or CIP) from a parent application.
• It is a divisional of a parent application.

Searching priority dates within a range query is particularly useful when searching for prior art.

To create data field follow these steps:

• Create the Field
• Set Permissions (access rights)
• Optionally, Import Data