Revise date searching syntax

[slifty]

Our documentation allows searches in terms of Application Date (@AD) and Related Application Date (@RLAD) and filing dates as well (@FD @RLFD).

The core use case is going to be to search before a certain date (we are going to be checking for content before a given filing date, since prior art after a filing date doesn't matter)

The dates also don't appear to work as expected in general. There is also a question about whether we care about "application dates" as opposed to things like publication date. The general sense is that we only should worry about publication date (and only allow searching in terms of that)

[reefdog]

A few notes gleaned from conversation and such (some mentioned above already):

• The key date is publication date. This is the date the document was first available publicly and is what the USPTO cares about. Here's how we're parsing publication date currently.
• We've raised the need to let users edit the publication date manually.
• According to Phillip/USPTO:
  • When publication date is unavailable, upload date can be the fallback; technically uploading is a form of publication.
  • Other dates (application, filing) aren't relevant for searching prior art.
  • Searching before a date is essentially the only requirement. Searching after a date or between dates would be fine to include but he repeated that it's basically not part of their workflow.
  • They would like to see the publication date on the search results screen. (We should either show both publication and upload, or just publication but communicate to the user if we're proxying the upload date.)

[wendylow1]

Per Philip, we should allow search using ‘@<YYYYMMDD’ (i.e. @<19960101) to find documents before the specified Publication Date. If Publication Date is not available, the tool will use Uploaded Date.