Awesome stuff, I really hope they nail this one dead.
That said, I'm pleased that we've finally gotten a number of jurists now who are better able to navigate the complexity of the Internet, programming, and 'process patents' when they involve Internet programming. I also find it remarkable that the Trolls have trained up a specific jurisdiction by over using it and are now at a disadvantage there. No doubt they will start looking for somewhere else to file soon but the effect will be the same as opinions and case law flow out of the east Texas courts.
I am perhaps an optimist, but I believe we have turned the corner on stupid patents. And more and more of them will be brought down and fewer of them will be of use to trolls. With luck in another 10 years people will be able to talk about the 'bad old days' of patent trolls as being behind them.
Citation needed on there being less ridiculous patents being filed, because I doubt it.
As far as Google Search goes, standard advice for any tech company to their employees is don't go searching for patents, just submit potentially patent-able ideas to legal. This is because if someone has a patent on something and you violate it and they can prove that you knew about the patent via subpoenaed records then you owe them three times as much as you would otherwise, so the more ignorant you are of existing patents the better.
And on the legal side of things, IP lawyers just search the USPTO records directly, not through Google Search.
I've read hundreds of patents over the past 7 years or so, so the first citation is simply my experience. You won't find, for example, a broad patent on something like bytecode like this one https://www.google.com/patents/US4667290 these days
However, I've been researching the patent system quite a bit, and have come across a number of studies about patent quality [1-12], including "software" patents [1, 2, 3, finding that software patents are no worse than other patents]. Unfortunately, there are many problems with these studies:
1) Judging patent quality is hard and time-consuming, and doing it for a significant number of patents to get data is much more so. Hence many studies use proxies to judge patent quality, such as back-citations [4, 5], or more complex multi-variate models [10] . And then other articles point out flaws in using proxies like this, or actually showing that the metrics actually show the opposite of what they conclude [6]. And then other studies that propose new metrics [7, 8, 9]
2) Related to 1, the other problem is looking at not enough data, looking at different subsets of data, or using different methodologies. Studies are usually careful to highlight these shortcomings and try to logically make an argument for generalizing these results, but it's hard to reach a general conclusion, especially since there is no real consensus.
Now, back to your [Citation Needed]: Few studies convincingly evaluate USPTO (or other) patent quality over time. One study that does find an improvement over time [10] attributes it to the KSR decision rather than Google. Another says that EU patents are getting better over time, though not the US [11]. Another one does briefly argue that US patent quality has been increasing over time [12] based on a bunch of other studies, but some of these use metrics that are not fool-proof, as I mentioned in point 1).
And no, patent lawyers and examiners do absolutely use Google for search.
That said, I'm pleased that we've finally gotten a number of jurists now who are better able to navigate the complexity of the Internet, programming, and 'process patents' when they involve Internet programming. I also find it remarkable that the Trolls have trained up a specific jurisdiction by over using it and are now at a disadvantage there. No doubt they will start looking for somewhere else to file soon but the effect will be the same as opinions and case law flow out of the east Texas courts.
I am perhaps an optimist, but I believe we have turned the corner on stupid patents. And more and more of them will be brought down and fewer of them will be of use to trolls. With luck in another 10 years people will be able to talk about the 'bad old days' of patent trolls as being behind them.