This is a basic question that has been asked many times before, although I'm have yet to read about it...

How to conduct a patent search? I have issues with the difficulties in doing so. Patents are titled in a manner that's usually not consistent or relevant to the nature of the invention. For example, an invention for, say, a plasma-based laser collimator may be titled something like, "Photonic Organization by Activation of a Fourth State of Matter and Focusing Method of the Same". Doing a Patent search for plasma laser collimator will not yield the aforementioned patent (assuming the search is being done on the patent title), even though it's the only patent for the laser collimator! I mean there's nothing in the patent title that would suggest that the invention is the plasma laser collimator I'm looking for; there's no mention of plasmas, lasers, or collimators anywhere in that title!

This seems to be a weak link in getting more people to file patents, because the search seems improbably daunting and far from transparent.

I know there's a way to do patent searches that isn't as involved as intuition seems to suggest. I'm just wondering what that way is.

Discuss!