Thinking about innovating? Maybe you’re a Web application startup and think you have the next big idea? Until now, your choice in figuring out if someone has already patented your big idea has pretty much boiled down to hiring a patent attorney, paying for an exhaustive search, get legal interpretation on what’s possible and then file your own patent if warranted.

While much of that legal work won’t go away, Google’s launch of a Patent Search beta goes a long way toward making the patent process just a tad bit more transparent — and holds the promise of being an extremely empowering tool for understanding what intellectual property already exists.

I’ve written twice before (here and here) about Nathan Myhrvold’s Intellectual Ventures…an organization seemingly trying to “corner the market” on the most likely and viable patentable ideas in order to build a portfolio of licensable patents (every cell of my being rails against that, by the way).

Here’s the possible “gotcha” with Google’s new “Global Database of Ideas” patent search offering and reveals yet another part of their strategy to infiltrate every corner of the Web and monetize every possible data stream.

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