METHODS AND COMPUTER-PROGRAM PRODUCTS FOR SEARCHING PATENT-RELATED DOCUMENTS USING SEARCH TERM VARIANTS

In one embodiment, a method of searching for patent-related documents stored in a document corpus include receiving, by a computing device, a search query comprising a first term and a second term, wherein the search query indicates that the first term is an equivalent of the second term, searching the document corpus for patent-related documents wherein the first term is used interchangeably with the second term, and preparing for display a list of one or more patent-related documents. In yet another embodiment, a method of searching a parts thesaurus, includes receiving, by a computing device, a search query including a search term, and searching the parts thesaurus for term variants of the search term. The method further includes preparing for display term variants of the search term found in the parts thesaurus.