Prior-art searching, step by step

Prior art is everything made available to the public anywhere in the world before your filing date — patents, papers, theses, products, videos, posts.

A practical sequence
1. Write 8–12 keywords and their synonyms (Indian English, US English, trade names).
2. Run quick keyword searches on Google Patents and Espacenet; open the 20 closest documents.
3. From those documents, collect their classifications (IPC/CPC). Search by classification — it finds documents that use different words for the same thing.
4. Follow citations forwards and backwards from the closest documents.
5. Check non-patent literature: Scholar, arXiv, Shodhganga, conference proceedings.
6. Check products: is it already sold?
7. Record everything in the log; save the passage that matters, not just the link.

Judging closeness: build a feature comparison table (template in Resources). A feature that no document shows, and that is not an obvious combination, is where your novelty may lie.

Limits to state honestly: paid databases you could not use, languages you could not read, and the fact that applications stay unpublished for 18 months — so the most recent filings are invisible to everyone.