Examiner Retrieval Test

Use this skill when the user wants to know whether a claim-shaped search would find one of their public disclosures, the way a patent examiner or a challenger would search.

This skill is Labor as Code™ for the Examiner Retrieval Test in Discoverability Engineering. The know-how is an operator's habit of searching for a disclosure the way a stranger under time pressure would, in the words a claim uses, and never in the words the company uses about itself.

The method comes from "Patents and Prior Art Are Public Evidence That Needs a Date Anyone Can Prove" and follows the controlled-test rules in "Controlled Tests and the Actionboard Show Whether Discovery Is Getting More Correct": the same queries, the same surfaces, three readings, the worst one scored. Read both. This skill repeats the test on the user's disclosures. It does not retell Merriden's first run.

The skill measures retrievability. It does not say that a disclosure is or is not prior art, and it does not change any page, record, or search engine setting. It never tries to get a disclosure to rank by any means other than the disclosure's own text and dated record.

Before running

1. Which records. Get the Prior Art Records to test. Each needs a teaches sentence. Stop and ask if one has none.
2. Which surfaces. Read specs/surfaces/patent-and-literature.yaml for the approved surfaces (for example a general web search engine and a scholarly and technical-literature index). The engineer approves surfaces. Do not add one.
3. What was run before. Read state/retrieval-tests/ so this run keeps the same queries. If the wording has to change, the old query is retired and the new one gets its own ID.

Step 1: Write the queries

For each record, write four to six queries:

1. Take the wording from the record's teaches sentence and, where they overlap, from the claims of patents in state/patent-watch/.
2. Write at least one query as long as a claim's first line, one as a shorter technical phrase, and one that names the standard or product.
3. Add one control query in the subject's own words. The control shows whether the disclosure is findable by people who already know it.
4. Give each query an ID (PQ-1, PQ-2, and so on) and store its text word for word. Do not retype it on a later run.

Step 2: Run each query three times on each surface

1. Run each query three times per approved surface, on separate occasions where the surface allows it. Record the date, the surface, and any setting that changes results (signed in, location).
2. Record the rank at which the disclosure's address appears, or NOT FOUND in the top 20. Save the result list it came from.
3. Score the worst of the three readings for each query and surface.
4. Do not open a result page on the user's behalf and click through to a login. Record what a search returns.

Step 3: Compute and record

Write one record per record ID and date in state/retrieval-tests/<date>-<record-id>.yaml with the queries, the surfaces, the ranks, and the count of readings in the top ten out of the total. The count is the prior-art retrievability figure for the Actionboard's fourteenth row ("3 of 8" means three readings out of eight ranked in the top ten).

Step 4: Conclude

State in plain words:

1. The result. Which queries found the disclosure and which did not, and whether the control found it when the claim-shaped queries did not.
2. The likely reason, from the record: a vague title, no class, words that differ from a claim's, or a surface that does not index that kind of page.
3. The smallest fix, with the reason it should help: a dated new version worded as a claim, a stated class, a copy where technical literature is indexed. The person who owns the record decides whether to publish it.
4. When to run it again, on the test set's calendar and after any new version goes up and has had time to be indexed.

Where the surfaces changed between runs, say so and do not compare the counts. Where the evidence is too thin to explain a miss, say so and name what would settle it.

What this skill does not do

• It does not change a page, a record, or a search setting.
• It does not treat a rank on the company's own site as a result.
• It does not add a surface the engineer has not approved.