thecodingmonk

If you're developing a product which uses advanced technology (developed by yourself), how much should you be worried that a part of what you are developing could already be patented by somebody else?

I'm not at all an expert regarding patents and my understanding is that they only apply in very specific/constrained situations, making an overlap with any other situation really unlikely. However, a search for keywords related to what I'm creating results in hundreds of patents with vaguely similar concepts and/or technologies.

The product that I'm developing is indeed based on somewhat advanced and technical AI and NLP stuff, but 90% of it is already described in publicly accessible scientific research articles. All things considered, I'm pretty sure that we're on the safe side here, but my cofounder expressed some concerns about this so I would like to make sure what the best course of action is, also considering that going through hundred of patents is a huge time sink not really a feasible task for a small startup with no revenue.

I'm developing a text search solutions that allows users to perform complex queries on large collections of text. I'm not aware of any similar existing solution at the moment, so I'm having a hard time researching it and would like to have your feedback on this idea.

In particular, instead of the usual keyword-based search the user can specify conditions on the entities that must be mentioned in the text document: for example, instead of searching names of members of Al-Qaeda the user can just specify the condition "member of" -> "Al-Qaeda". Analogously, searches can be done, for example, for documents mentioning "any river longer than 2km passing through France", "any italian cheese", "any drug that is used to treat panic attacks", etc... The system supports a very large number of query "conditions" so that the user can basically express almost unlimited kinds of queries.

I hope this is enough context to allow people to give an informed answer. What I'm asking is basically what kind of businesses would you market this solution to? How would you go marketing this kind of product? From my point of view (developer, no marketing/business skills) I always have an hard time figuring out what the best solution is.