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(ω agg = 4.3±0.1(γ) + 41.1±2.5, p < 0.1), which results from the prior art fields in the
aggregator websites and provides little new information on the value of the patent even
though the signal is amplified.

Figure 8. Web hits versus future prior art citations from patents in 1995 (A) and 2005 (B)
solar energy patents

However, signal websites (ω sig = ω −ω agg ) can provide unique information that diverges
from the predominantly linear correlation observed in aggregator Web hits because their
Web presence is the result of human intervention and is a measure of market importance
or commercial interest. Indeed, the signal Web hits contain significantly more variability

and do not correlate (ω = 1.1±0.2(γ) + 17.4±2.8, p > 0.5). Interesting outliers can be
sig
identified when the patents have a significantly higher ratio of signal Web hits to
citations, such as those patents that are circled by the dotted lines in Figure 8. These data
points highlight Web information, which may be unique compared to prior art

information. Qualitative inspection of the highlighted patents shows that the Web hits
result from an active description similar to the aforementioned Wikipedia example. Only
one of seven highlighted patents has a high signal count that comes from a true error
wherein the search terms occur in websites; these websites that use the same terms as
designations for an unrelated company. These data indicate that while the measure is
nuanced and requires some manual validation, the signal contained in these Web hits is
different from the citation data and worth further investigation.

To extend this initial investigation, we also compared two populations of patents, those
that were licensed (n = 81) and those that were not (n = 304). An assumption is that
licensed patents are of more commercial or market importance than the unlicensed
patents [76]. We expect that they may have a different signature of Web hits as a
measure of that commercial impact. Each patent received a mixture of aggregator (B)
and signal (A) Web hits (Figure 9), which appeared to have different signatures for
licensed versus unlicensed patents.

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