About

Who's actually going to do the work.

Examiner Search is one person. One searcher, one name on the report, and five years inside patent firms deciding what counts as prior art.

I'm Mike Smith. I live in Little Elm, Texas. I started my career as an Airborne Operations apprentice in the Air Force, worked PCB production at Hitachi, and then spent eight years as a mechanical engineer at Naval Surface Warfare Center — the DoD lab that maintains the fleet. I left NSWC with a Secret clearance (now lapsed), a lot of Lean and a lot of failure-analysis, and the conviction that I wanted to work on things people could see and use.

I went to the USPTO as a Patent Examiner in internal combustion engines. Six months of reading prior art from the inside taught me how patent offices actually think, and it taught me what "101" and "112" mean in practice rather than theory. I left examining for a patent analyst role at Dominion Harbor, then Concept IP, and most recently Ensemble IP where I'm currently a Patent Engineer. Across those firms I've billed daily for freedom-to-operate, patentability, landscape, and invention-disclosure work — and I have sat on both sides of the question this practice now answers for a fee.

Somewhere in the Dominion Harbor years I got tired of manually constructing Boolean queries in Google Patents, so I learned to ship software. I went through Coding Dojo in Dallas for the fundamentals and then published the Patent Search Generator Chrome extension, which is still on the Chrome Web Store today. That first extension turned into a habit: nine shipped apps — six Chrome extensions (five live on the Chrome Web Store), a web SaaS in beta (JackpotKeywords), and two desktop apps in the pipeline.

Examiner Search is what happens when the person who examined the applications and the person who searches against them turn out to be the same person.

Why Examiner Search

A search is only worth what its negative is worth. Most searches never show you how they looked.

I've lived the docket pressure, the invention-disclosure stacks, and the 20-hour FTO project nobody wants to staff. I have also read prior art from inside the Office, which is where you learn what an examiner will actually accept and what they will wave through.

That is the entire pitch. Anyone can send you a list of hits. The hard part is the report that says nothing is there and is worth believing — which takes a record of every query, every class and every database, and a name willing to stand behind it.

Timeline

  1. Feb 2024 – Present
    Patent Engineer · Ensemble IP

    FTO, patentability, landscape, and invention-disclosure work across mechanical, electrical, and software domains.

  2. Feb 2023 – Feb 2024
    Field Service Engineer · Atecspine

    Applied mechanical engineering to X-ray system diagnostics and field repair.

  3. Apr 2022 – Sep 2023
    Patent Analyst · Concept IP

    Boolean search, prior art evaluation, office-action response drafting for US and PCT. Material science + electrical engineering focus.

  4. May 2019 – Jan 2022
    Patent Analyst · Dominion Harbor

    Patentability, validity, FTO, infringement. Published Patent Search Generator to the Chrome Web Store during this period. Built domain coverage in IEEE standards, mobile comms, ML, image processing.

  5. Aug 2016 – Jan 2017
    Patent Examiner · USPTO

    Internal combustion engines art unit. Prior-art searches, office actions, claim analysis, drawings.

  6. Jun 2008 – Jun 2016
    Mechanical Engineer · Naval Surface Warfare Center (DoD)

    8 years. Complex mechanical systems, Lean process improvement, technical documentation. Lapsed Secret clearance.

  7. Jun 2007 – Jul 2008
    Production Engineer · Hitachi Computer Products

    PCB production quality + statistical process control.

  8. Jun 1999 – Jun 2004
    Airborne Operations Apprentice · US Air Force

    Airborne battle management systems.

Education. B.S. Mechanical Engineering, The University of Oklahoma (2008). Software Development Certificate, Coding Dojo Dallas (2021).

What I've shipped

Nine shipped apps — six Chrome extensions (five live on the Chrome Web Store) plus a web SaaS and two desktop apps. The Chrome Web Store titles include AI Patent Search Generator, used by patent professionals to build Boolean queries against Google Patents and generate prior-art reports; BulkListingPro for bulk Etsy listing with AI; GovToolsPro for SAM.gov bid estimation; TubePilot for reaction-video production; and MarkItUp for AI image annotation. JackpotKeywords (web, beta) rounds out the SEO side.

See the full portfolio →

What I won't do

  • › Give legal advice. A search is analyst work product, not an opinion of counsel. I tell you what the art says; your attorney decides what it means for your matter.
  • › Tell anyone what you asked about. Which patent you are looking at, and why, is often the most sensitive thing in the matter. It is confidential from the moment it arrives, whether or not we end up working together.
  • › Take a matter I should decline. Every request is conflict-checked before it is accepted. If I have searched the other side of your patent, you will hear that instead of a quote.
  • › Hand you a result without the record. Every search ships with the queries, the classes and the databases searched. A negative you cannot audit is not a negative; it is a shrug.

The fastest way to find out whether I can help is to send me the patent.

A no-cost preliminary screen: I read the file wrapper, tell you what the examiner already searched, and say plainly whether I think there is room to work. No references named, no fee, no obligation.

Start a search → Or a 30-min intro call