Search Prior Art

Access USPTO APIs for patent/trademark searches, examination history (PEDS), assignments, citations, office actions, TSDR, for IP analysis and prior art searches. Part of the AlterLab Academic Skills suite.

Map the intellectual property landscape for a technology domain or product area. Covers patent cluster analysis, white space identification, competitor IP portfolio assessment, freedom-to-operate preliminary screening, and strategic IP positioning recommendations. Use before starting R&D in a new technology area, when evaluating market entry against incumbents with strong patent portfolios, preparing for investment due diligence, informing a patent filing strategy, or assessing freedom-to-operate risk for a new product.

Screen a proposed trademark for conflicts and distinctiveness before filing. Covers trademark database searches (TMview, WIPO Global Brand Database, USPTO TESS), distinctiveness analysis using the Abercrombie spectrum, likelihood of confusion assessment using DuPont factors and EUIPO relative grounds, common law rights evaluation, and goods/services overlap analysis. Produces a conflict report with a risk matrix. Use before adopting a new brand name, logo, or slogan — distinct from patent prior art search, which uses different databases, legal frameworks, and analysis methods.

Invoke parallel document-specialist agents for external web searches and documentation lookup

Use whenever the user wants to find, shortlist, vet, or enrich US cybersecurity firms — pen-testing/red team, security audits, vCISO, SOC 2 readiness, incident response, managed SOC, IAM, cloud security, and AppSec. Triggers on "find me a pen-testing firm for our SOC 2 audit", "shortlist three vCISO services for our healthcare-tech startup", "we need an incident response retainer", or "pull contact info for these 8 security firm domains", even when described indirectly (we got breached, prepare us for the compliance audit, get us SOC 2 ready). Drives the ServiceGraph API (api.servicegraph.co) — a 100k+ US firm catalog filterable by industry, services, location, size, ratings. Skip in-house security hires, "how do I patch CVE-X" or "configure firewall Y" DIY questions, security-product reviews (CrowdStrike vs SentinelOne, etc.), generic security knowledge questions, consumer/personal security advice, non-US firms, individual freelancers and bug-bounty hunters.

Guides MongoDB users through implementing and optimizing Atlas Search (full-text), Vector Search (semantic), and Hybrid Search solutions. Use this skill when users need to build search functionality for text-based queries (autocomplete, fuzzy matching, faceted search), semantic similarity (embeddings, RAG applications), or combined approaches. Also use when users need text containment, substring matching ('contains', 'includes', 'appears in'), case-insensitive or multi-field text search, or filtering across many fields with variable combinations. Provides workflows for selecting the right search type, creating indexes, constructing queries, and optimizing performance using the MongoDB MCP server.