Roebuck concedes that his work is labor intensive and repetitive, but insists that it gets results. He maintains that companies lose plenty of potential customers if their Web site's address doesn't appear by the fourth page of search results. All Web Promotions could use its own services. The global push for technology patents has spawned Delphion , a new Lisle-based business spun off from IBM . The company, launched last month, provides access to more than 45 million patent documents filed in the United States, Europe and Japan.
Online tools allow users to analyze that information.
More than 150,000 users hit the search engine a total of 10 million times a week, using Delphion's database to watch for patent licensing opportunities, targets for acquisition and, of course, their competitors' every move. We're giving everyone a better way to track it. The number of Internet-related patents has grown substantially. Micropatent , another patent and trademark research company, reported that only 592 Internet-related patents were awarded in 1996. That number increased to about 8,500 worldwide by 1999.