In early 2008 the Israeli Patent Office (IPO) had launched a search engine that only allowed searching the fields of title and bibliographical details of granted Israeli patents. Before 2008 one could only search for a granted patent manually by reviewing journals provided by the IPO that only included the title and name of the applicants. Until 2008 pending patent applications were utterly inaccessible for the public.
Obviously, the 2008 search engine was search was limited when searching for patents and patent applications, since one could not conduct full text search or even search the abstract of the patents.
Recently, the IPO collaborated with WIPO and launched a new interface that allows searching through full text of over 40,000 Israeli patents as well as patent applications using WIPO PatentScope search engine. This finally allows comfortable and relatively efficient searching through IL patent applications.
Having said that, unlike other countries such as the US or Europe, where patent applications are published within 18 months from their priority date, in Israel, only patent applications that have passed the examination process and are allowable are published. Therefore, one can still only view title and bibliographical details of a patent application that is not yet allowed or that is abandoned. Since it takes an average of a couple of years or so until each application reaches an examination in Israel, you can imagine the time it can take until an application is allowed by the examiner. So here we are, still only half way through but getting there in our own time.
My advice is that if you are looking for an Israeli patent application try and see if it has any parallel non-Israeli patent applications through the new interface – and retrieve and view the full text of the parallel application.
Link to the new search interface:
http://www.wipo.int/patentscope/search/en/
בימים אלו ישנם הליכי חקיקה, אשר – במידה שיתקבלו – יהפכו את ישראל למדינה ככל המדינות ויאפשרו פרסום בקשות פטנט.