General features of trade mark searching

Although there are other aims of trade mark searching, a common cause for both examiners and other stakeholders (e.g. businesses making applications, anti-infringement and counterfeit enforcement agents) is to uncover aspects that may be deceptively similar to existing marks covering similar products and services (often narrowed by Nice classifications). 

Distinguishing characteristics and similarities may be of both figurative and verbal types.  Verbal similarities may include visual, phonological, and synonymic aspects, all of which comprise important language-specific factors.  Thus, one section below relates to pattern recognition, with a focus on searching visual images, and another relates to particularities of foreign characters as marks.  For example, distinguishing characters of similar appearance or that have phonetical equivalence when the alphabet used is non-Roman.

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