To search the United States patent office you want to click on the quick search link, which will take you to a page with a very simple form.  Let's say that you're innovation is to create an insulated straw, and you want to see if other people have invented something similar.  So in the term one box you want to type the word straw, and you want to tell it to search the title of all the patents and click the search button, and you will see that it returns almost 500 potential patents to look through, which is quite a lot so we want to try limiting our search.  So we go back to the word form and type in the word straw again.  Make sure you tell it to search the titles, and let's use the word insulated to get -- to narrow our search terms.  Make sure you search the title field and click search again.  This time we only get two results, making it much easier for us to look at so let's look at the first one, the bendable insulated drinking straw.  That brings up a copy of the patent that's on file, and you can see that it was patented by somebody named Float Andele Y. It's a bendable insulated drinking straw for drinking hot and cold liquids.  If you read the abstract, an abstract is just a short paragraph giving a brief description about what this is.  And you can scroll down and see other information about this patent.  In the claims section the owner of this patent will tell you what they claim this product will do better than or differently than other straws, and it gives you additional information as well.  One of the other things you can do is click on the images button they have images on file for all the patents however the US patent office uses a TIFF image format, which requires a QuickTime plug-in.  If you don't have the QuickTime plug-in you won't be able to see this so you can follow documentation from your web browser or you can go to apple.com and download QuickTime and make sure that you check the box to install the plug-in for QuickTime.  So here is our picture of the insulated straw it gives us a schematic diagram and gives you a better idea of what this particular patent looks like, and you can compare it to the invention that you've created, and that's all there is to it.