Date Ranges with Look and Automation

The Look command updates the Issue Date range of patents and the Publication Date range of published applications to be hit by a query based on the range originally specified in the QBF dialog when the search was created.  Automation, on the other hand, updates date ranges based on the automation parameters you set for a search in the Saved Searches dialog.  The following two paragraphs explain how date ranges are updated.

Look

If a date range was specified when the query was created in the QBF form, that date range will be updated and applied to running the query with Look.  For example, if a query was created on February 3, 2004 to retrieve patents and published applications meeting the criteria entered for other fields (e.g, Assignee, Claims) that were issued in the last 6 days, the saved search would include the following for the Issue Date/Publication Date fields:  01-27-2004->02-02-2004¯_6_.  The date range originally submitted to the USPTO database server would have been 01-27-2004->02-02-2004.  The expression appended to that date range in the saved search, "¯_6_", stores the number of days originally specified for the date range.  The expression is appended so that updated date ranges with the same number of days can be computed whenever the saved search is run using Look.  If the same search is run again using Look on February 17, 2004, the date range is updated using the current date and the factor of the last 6 days.  The query as newly submitted would use the date range 02-11-2004->02-17-2004.

Automation

When selected saved searches are run again by automation, PatentWatcher™ ignores the date range originally specified and computes a current date range using the automation parameters.  Assume that a query was originally created with an Issue Date/Publication Date query term of 13 days, but the automation parameter for the query is one week.  When running the query by automation, PatentWatcher™ ignores the original 13-day term and uses a one-week date range.  This synchronizes the date range parameter of the query with the automation interval.

If the automation interval is a named day of the week, PatentWatcher™ treats the date range as one week since the automation interval is, in effect, one week.