Show HN: I made a patent search tool designed for stock research

Regardless of the legitimacy of these business transitions, I think it's useful for investors to know which companies are doing research into new technological areas.

It’s difficult to use existing tools (like Google Patents) for this purpose, because the vast majority of patents are not registered to publicly-traded companies. Companies also often register patents under a wide variety of names.

To fix this problem, I scraped patent data from the USPTO website (https://bulkdata.uspto.gov) and then used a text-matching algorithm to identify which patents were assigned to Russell 3000 companies (the 3,000 largest publicly-traded companies in the US). From there, it was easy to match each patent to a specific ticker.

You can use this tool to search for a keyword, and find all recent patents by Russell 3000 companies (standardized by ticker) with an abstract containing the keyword.