How do trademark watch services search for similar trademarks?

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Written by Jan Buza

Co-founder of Trama

Trademark watch services regularly search selected trademark databases to find potentially similar trademark applications. When evaluating entries for similarity, the following approaches are often used:

  • Grammatical & syntax analysis, including misspellings, plurals, prefixes, abbreviations and more.
  • Checking for translations
  • Phonetic matching, where the algorithm can detect trademarks that sound similar, even if spelt differently.
  • Class-based filtering, where classes of goods and services associated with the trademarks are taken into account.
  • Image recognition techniques for evaluating visual similarity in figurative marks.

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