To be clear, I do think that patent searching has improved. My point is that it hasn't kept up with the shear number of documents available. You have a point a

To be clear, I do think that patent searching has improved. My point is that it hasn't kept up with the shear number of documents available. You have a point about the switch to computerized searches. Searching by examiners used to be looking through paper files, not microfiche, though. But patent search technology hasn't improved appreciably since full text patent search was introduced in the 1990s. There have been a lot of new documents to search in the past 25 years alone, yet there have been few changes to examining time. Also, full text search is probably not as useful as you think for patent examination. For many technologies it's the best way to search, but for many others (like a lot of what I examine), text search is much less useful than simply flipping through a ton of documents, looking at the drawings. It's common that important details exist only in the drawings or are most easily spotted in the drawings. So this limits the improvement one gets from switching to computerized searches. And, there's a big advantage to paper documents that wasn't maintained during the switch. From what I'm told there were a lot of useful notes from previous examiners written on the patent documents. Those notes were entirely thrown out when the USPTO switched to computerize searches. They could have digitized them, but USPTO upper management isn't known for thinking ahead. That's a loss of a lot of institutional knowledge. At present there is no way for examiners to share margin notes, and there should be. (Again, like my other comments here, this is just my opinion, not that of the USPTO or US government.)