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Do-It-Yourself Market Search
More free advice to get you started.
DIY market search
Nowadays, most people who offer a product for sale obviously offer it on the Internet. There are plenty of very good product search resources online, and the few listed here are, as one would expect, absolutely free.
For a typical product search on the general internet, limit your search to your main noun (and any relevant synonyms) plus one or two distinguishing concepts. For a CD wall bracket, for example, you might try:
- cd wall bracket
- cd wall clip
- compact disk wall bracket
- compact disk wall clip
- cd vertical holder
Product search services
Google Shopping
A huge list of shopping resources collected in one place. Enter your keywords to see what competitive products are available.
Amazon
Amazon includes many affiliate sellers as well as its own inventory. If it's for sale on the web, it's likely here.
ThomasNet
The online version of the ThomasRegister, an industry guide to products and their manufacturers.
Major search engines
Try Google, Bing, Yahoo and multi-engine tools like Dogpile or WebCrawler — not everyone describes a product the same way.
Enclose your search strings in quotation marks to force the search engines to return only pages with that exact phrase. But be sure to try a variety of search strings, since not everyone will describe the product using the same words. This process is hit or miss for a non-professional, but a quick obvious hit can save you time and money.
If you still don't find anything that would likely pre-empt your potential patent after your own hard work of searching, that's a good sign. Unfortunately, that doesn't mean you are home free — at that point, it's time to call in the experts at QuickPatents to look under all the rocks.
Found nothing? That's good news.
Let's talk about the next step in protecting your invention.