The second way to improve the USPTO.gov website would be to double check all of the information provided as facts.
For example, the Full-Text Database FAQ (among other pages) notes that (emphasis added):
Patents from January 1976 to the present offer the full searchable text, including all bibliographic data, such as the inventor’s name, the patent’s title, and the assignee’s name; the abstract; the full description of the invention; and the claims….
Patents from 1790 to December 1975 offer only the patent number, issue date, and current US patent classification in the text display, and can be searched only within those fields. However, this limited text display also includes a hyperlink to obtain full-page images of all pages of the patent.
While the page says that only patents January 1976 to the present are full text, a little digging reveals that the first full-text patent is U.S. Patent No. 3,555,944, issued January 19, 1971.
However, a quick review of the first design patent issued in 1976 (D238,315) reveals that it is not full text. Odd.
The solution would be to update that FAQ page (and everywhere else the topic is discussed) with the actual patent numbers and/or coverage of the Full-Text Database.
Update (2010.07.27): In digging through some old notes, I previously noted that the earliest full-text patent was 3,572,436. Perhaps they are slowly working backwords through the database…
Issue: TESS times out on a user if the user stops using it for a very short period of time. While that, itself, is quite annoying (I can’t think of any other website I use that tells me that my session has “timed out”), the REAL annoying part is that the time out page doesn’t return you to the TESS search page. Instead, it dumps you back to the USPTO home page, requiring the user to navigate back to the TESS search page.
