> And the people filing obviously make sure their language doesn't easily bring back prior art. Meanwhile you have no skin in the game at all.
You'd think so, but standard operating procedure for most patent prosecution is to intentionally not perform a prior art search. If you do find something relevant, you have to disclose it in your IDS. So let's say you pop in a few search terms into google patents, and there's ten thousand hits. You know only a few are relevant, but you don't know which few. And if you don't submit the relevant reference that was on page 99 of those search results, your patent could be invalidated in litigation some day because it could be construed that you were hiding that reference from the examiner. So you might think that you should just submit all 10k references? Wrong again, it could look like you're trying to bury some super important reference in a sea of garbage. So by opening one browser tab and typing in a couple of search terms, you've essentially shot yourself in the foot one way or another, and any patent that ever is issued from your search will have a target on it's back forever. So, most patent attorneys will ask the client for relevant references to cite in the IDS and have a standard practice to not perform any prior art searching for prosecution purposes. Patent attorneys are a paranoid bunch.