Patent examiners are generally not allowed to search external sources for information about unpublished apps. I've had this discussion numerous times with exa

Patent examiners are generally not allowed to search external sources for information about unpublished apps. I've had this discussion numerous times with examiners and PTO officials while working on improving prior art finding on google.com/patents. They have a very fixed number of sources they search, and are generally not allowed to search elsewhere with unpublished app info. So I can pretty much 100% guarantee you they are not searching patents.stackexchange for information. (Plus, patents.stackexchange themselves do not suggest examiners use it that way. They email examiners). For published apps (this was recently published), they are allowed to do more, but they generally don't anyway. They stick to the databases/etc that are available to them internally.