I would like to do patent search, let's say for patents related to windshield wipers, and have the search results include the number of times a patent has been referenced as prior art in other patent applications. In my mind, many such references indicates a patent is "important". Ideally I could even filter my search to only return frequently-referenced patents.
Can any search tool do this? Especially free ones like Google patents, freepatentsonline, etc.?
My go to site for this sort of thing is Lens. It is one of the best for structured patent searching and you have many options for ordering results including "Relevance", "Cited by Patent Count", "Cited NPL Count", "Cited Resolved Scholarly Works Count" and many others. This page shows an example search. It is almost entirely free (there are some advanced features you would need to pay for. You don't need to create an account, but if you do you get some extra features like stored searches and alerts.
