[juxta]

What is the reason why Google is shutting down Patent Search and (they already shut down Uncle Sam)? I mean - does it really cost them a lot of money to keep these sites running but not update them? For search products like that they should at least make a google product archive to at least access some stuff that could be easily found via those search products even though they no longer update or provide support for them anymore.

They are going away from their motto of "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful". Yes you can find patents via other means or get government info via other means but it's defeating the motto of making it universally accessible.

Google+ is ruining everything.

[edwinnathaniel]

From TC: "Other tools, like Patent Search, are being integrated into the main Google experience."

From Google's own announcement: "We're redirecting the old Patent Search homepage to google.com to make sure everyone is getting the best possible experience for their patent searches. Over the past few months, we've been making updates and improvements to the Patent Search functionality on google.com—not only are you able to search the same set of U.S. patents with the same advanced search options, the new experience loads twice as fast as the old Patent Search homepage, contributes to a unified search experience across Google, and sports Google Doodles as well. The team looks forward to including patents from other countries soon, and will be rolling out additional features to Patent Search on google.com in the future."

Please re-read the whole announcement.

Oh and I don't think I see anywhere Google+ being mentioned....

[DanBC]

They're not shutting down patent search - they're just kludging it into the regular Google search interface.

(My Google Scholar still has a []patents check box. Will that go?)

[juxta]

the reason why i said google+ is ruining everything is referring to how they are focusing on one thing and that thing is Google+ as per the convo Sergey had with Jobs about concentrating on one thing and stop turning into Microsoft.

[sad_panda]

And... they aren't shutting down Patent Search. Your rant is baseless.